Transcript Parallelism

PARALLELISM
THE HEART OF LANGUAGE LOGIC IS CONSISTENCY, WHICH
GRAMMAR CALLS PARALLELISM.
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Consistency
• This means that once you start doing it one way, you
must keep doing it that way.
o If you’re making a list and the first item in the list is a verb, make all
the items in the list verbs; if it’s a participle, make all the items
participles. The same goes for nouns, adjectives, full sentences—
anything.
Tenses, Numbers, and Pronouns
If you start telling a story in the
past tense, stay in the past
tense.
If you start talking about
parents in the plural, stay in the
plural.
If you start referring to a
hypothetical person as her/him,
continue calling the person
her/him.
Nonparallel Lists
• One of the most common parallelism
problems is un-parallel lists:
• For example: “I gained organization
and speaking skills, along with quick
thinking.”
The first item in the list is skills, which
are things you possess; the second
is thinking, which is an action. The
things you have aren’t parallel to
the thing you do. You could fix it in
several ways:
Revise for Consistency
• Rewrites:
“I gained organization and speaking skills, and the
ability to think quickly.” or
“I gained the ability to organize, speak well, and
think quickly.” or
“I got good at organizing, speaking, and thinking
quickly.”
Tense Changes
• The law of parallelism says—Stay in the same
verb tense unless your meaning has shifted
tense too.
Changing Tenses
• For example:
A spelling game may excite children and make
learning fun. The class will be split in half. The first half
will continue reading and writing while the second
half plays the game. The group playing the game
would line up across the room. Each child is given a
chance to roll a set of dice.
Revise
• Here is a revision in present tense:
A spelling game can excite the
children and make learning fun.
Split the class in half. The first half
continues reading and writing
while the second half plays the
game. The group playing the
game lines up across the room.
Each child is given a chance to
roll a set of dice.
Subject-Verb Agreement
• Subjects and verbs are supposed to agree in
number—they should both be singular or both
be plural.
Common Verb Agreement Problems
• Most agreement problems occur when the subject
and verb get separated by distracting business in
between:
Example: If a child is made to write on a topic of
little interest to him, the chances of his learning
anything from the experience is slim.
Rewrite: If a child is made to write on a topic of
little interest to him, the chances of his learning
anything form the experience are slim.
Pronoun Agreement
• Pronouns refer to nouns: in “George said he
could,” “he” must refer to “George.”
The Rules of Pronouns
• A pronoun has to follow four rules:
1.The noun it refers to must be physically present on
the page.
2.The noun must precede the pronoun.
Pronoun Rules
3. The noun must be the first
noun you reach, reading
back from the pronoun,
that can logically be the
pronoun’s referent.
4. And the pronoun and
noun must agree in
number: they must both
be singular or be plural.
In a Nutshell
• Consistency in language is called
parallelism.
• In order to create a sense of
consistency in writing, you must be
sure that your tenses, numbers, and
pronouns are consistent throughout.
• Don’t be afraid to revise your work to
reach an agreement between the
various elements discussed here.
• Without a sense of consistency, your
readers will find it difficult to follow
your logic.
Resources
• This presentation was adapted from various preexisting PowerPoints
found online. Many thanks to the various university writing labs for their
contributions and inspiration.
• All images found through yahoo image search at:
https://images.search.yahoo.com