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Watch out for faulty parallelism!
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A sentence is parallel when there is a series of items listed—and they all share the same grammatical structure (all are nouns or verbs or phrases, for example). Writers use parallelism to help readers see connections between ideas and to emphasize particular points. (There's some parallelism now!)
But it is easy to make mistakes when trying to use parallelism in your writing. Faulty parallelism occurs when items in a series do not have the same grammatical structure.
Let's look at some sentences with faulty parallelism and see how to correct them:
Faulty: Cramming for exams is hard, boring, and it doesn't pay.
Correct: Cramming for exams is hard, boring and pointless. [3 adjectives]
Faulty: The sisters bought shoes, bags and then went to lunch.
Correct: The sisters bought shoes, bags and lunch. [3 nouns]
Faulty: Sylvain travelled by plane, boat and by train.
Correct: Sylvain travelled by plane, by boat and by train. [3 phrases]
Correct: Sylvain travelled by plane, boat and train. [3 nouns]
It is very easy to create sentences with faulty parallelism. So whenever you write a series of items in a sentence, make sure you read the series again to make sure that the elements are parallel. Your readers will thank you!
