Lesson: English Grammar - 19

Parallelism: Keeping Everything in Line

[Page 19 of 28]

First things first, what is parallelism? Well, it's what you get when you place similar elements of a sentence in a similar form. Why does parallelism matter to you? Again, it's tested pretty frequently, so you'll want to learn how to identify it, and how to correct it.

Let's take the following sentence:

Example 1: I like to play tennis and watching baseball.

Does anything strike you as wrong? The problem is that the sentence's structure is not parallel. It offers two activities that follow from the initial verb "I like." If they were expressed as two different sentences, they would be: "I like to play tennis. I like watching baseball." As separate sentences, no problem; but when they're placed in one sentence, the activities need to be expressed in the same grammatical form. Thus, the sentence needs to read:

  • I like to play tennis and to watch baseball.
  • I like to play tennis and watch baseball.
  • I like playing tennis and watching baseball.

In all three corrections, the two activities have similar grammatical forms. This makes them parallel, and correct.

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