A Good Example of an Incorrect Parallelism

• This is a really long sentence, so I made the parallel words bold.
• The sentence is also from two months ago, so the politics is out of date, and I always tell you to ignore the politics anyway; this is a blog about writing and grammar.

Okay, now to the grammar. The rule is that parallel constructions should have the same form. See what the writer did here?

Sounds funny when I point out the crooked parallelism, doesn’t it? The second verb should be “jeopardize” to match “would delay. (You can assume a “would” before “jeopardize.”)

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When you have a compound subject or predicate, especially when they’re connected with a coordinating conjunction, they should have the same grammatical structure. Panel 1: the bird gets it wrong:

The bird should have said “…look good as well as taste good.” This is a fairly common mistake. Be alert for them when you read. Then you can join the grammar police!

Yes, “as well as” counts as a coordinating conjunction.

I see this mistake a lot.

First panel:

He should say “What would you say if I were playing golf instead of cleaning the garage?”

or

What would you say if I played golf instead of cleaned the garage?”

The two parts of his sentence are parallel, so they should have the same verb form.

Of course, in this case he’s wrong no matter what he says…

When you create a compound structure in a sentence (such as a compound predicate, which we have here), you need to be careful. Both parts of the compound (both sides of the conjunction) should have the same structure. Look at the second panel in this Buckles:

He says the hair provides protection as well as holding the heat in. “Provides” is not the same verb form as “Holding,” so the two parts of the sentence aren’t parallel. Bad. Restate the sentence with “and” instead of “as well as” and the non-parallelness is easier to see. The hair provides protection and holding in the heat? Nah. It should be “provides protection as well as holds in the heat.”

You have a way around this, by the way, if you don’t like that way of saying it. Replace “as well as” with “while.” “While” turns the second phrase into an adverb, which modifies the verb without trying to be parallel to it. “Provides protection while holding in the heat.” That works!

PS—This error is not uncommon, by the way. I just ran into it in a Scientific American article:

Scientists think that its unusually low density causes impacts to indent the surface rather than excavating it.

Should be “excavate.”

A lot of sentences in English are constructed with two parts that are semantically connected. We call this parallelism. Whenever you construct a sentence with parallel parts, those of us in the know consider it good form to make the parallel parts have the same structure. (Search on “parallelism” in the search box on the upper right of this page to find at least five other times wrote about this.) I remember my English teacher back in high school mentioning this, and our grammar book, Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition, had some pretty good examples, which I don’t remember. I still recommend that book if you want to have a good grammar text on hand. You can get it on Amazon. But I digress.

An example should help, because what I just wrote is rather vague. Here’s an example of a guy getting it wrong in one sentence and getting it right in the next.

To invoke another axiom, he shows rather than telling. And whether that’s a rule or a cliche, it’s true.

“Shows” is parallel to “telling,” a verb and a participle—bad. The second word should be “tells.” In the next sentence, “that’s” is parallel to “it’s,” both of which are subject-verb combinations, so that’s good. Nice even, because both are not only s-v combinations, but they’re both contractions. He’s a professional writer, a journalist even, so I suppose I should add that this rule is often broken.

But you’re better off if you don’t break it.