Alfredo Deambrosi

As my students learn grammar, they often ask, how is this stuff supposed to help my writing? This week, as I teach parts of speech, I am planning to give some tips about how knowledge of the parts of speech can directly help one’s writing.

One area of help is parallelism. Readers prefer sentences that are parallel (coordinate). When joining elements within a sentence, join similar elements. The sentence below is understandable but does not show complete parallelism.

He is an actor, a poet, and plays the violin.

The next two show better parallelism.

He is an actor, a poet, and a violinist.
He acts, composes poetry, and plays the violin.

These two sentences are more pleasant to read than the first, even if the reader does not know the reason for the difference. What actually happened in the last two sentences is that they connected words that represented the same parts of speech. “Actor,” “poet,” and “violinist” are all nouns. “Acts,” “composes,” and “plays” are all verbs. (The example sentences above come from sentences on pages 103-104 in College Writing by Ronald Horton).

Think of bad parallelism as uneven asphalt. Nobody likes potholes. They make drivers slow down unnecessarily. Similarly, incomplete parallelism can delay and distract your reader unnecessarily.

I look forward to displaying for my students how learning other elements of grammar (phrases, clauses, and so forth) can benefit writing.