Parallelism

(I wrote about parallelism at least twice before. Follow the links.)

Parallelism in your writing is a good thing. Parallelism means that when you compare two (or more) ideas, the writing should have the same structure. Here are two sentences from an interesting Quora article that don’t have parallelism, but they should. So I’ll fix them.

 In many cases, it was starting to look like it would be cheaper to scrap some aircraft than trying to fix them.

The more aircraft they inspected the red flags were hoisted ever higher.

First sentence: (We’ll ignore that the “like” should be “as if.”) We’re comparing cheapness. The first part of the comparison is “…to scrap.” So far so good. But the second part is “trying to fix.” An infinitive and a present participle; not parallel. Our aircraft engineer has a couple options. He could write “…than (to) try to fix them.” Or he could write “…than to fix them.” (The “to” in parentheses is implied, so grammatically it’s there.) Anyway, now both parts of the sentence have infinitives, so now they match. Nice and parallel. Yes, he could change the first part, too: “Cheaper scrapping the planes than fixing them,” but I think the infinitives work better.

Second sentence: Here we’re comparing degree—the number of aircraft, and the height of the flags. “More” is the comparative form of “much,” and it comes first. “Higher” is also comparative, but it’s last! Put it first: The more aircraft they inspected, the higher the red flags were hoisted. Now the sentence has a nice parallelism.

Go thou and do likewise.