Welcome back. In our last session, you began the crucial process of revision, learning to approach your draft with the distinct mindsets of an architect (substantive editing) and a craftsman (line editing). This lesson builds directly on that work, adding a powerful and precise tool to your line-editing toolkit.
Your goal today is to practice using parallel structure to add emphasis and clarity in evaluative writing. You may have heard the term "parallelism" before, but we're going to treat it not just as a grammatical rule to avoid errors, but as a rhetorical device to make your writing more rhythmic, memorable, and persuasive—qualities essential in entertainment journalism.
1. The Principle of Balance: What is Parallel Structure?
At its core, parallel structure—or parallelism—is about balance. It means using the same grammatical form for two or more similar ideas within a sentence. When you create a list, make a comparison, or connect a series of actions, parallelism ensures the reader understands that these elements are equal in importance. When this balance is broken, the sentence can feel clumsy and confusing. When it's executed well, your prose gains a sense of polish and authority.
To get a feel for this concept, let's start with a video that uses a helpful analogy.
Parallel Structure | A Quintilian Institute Special Presentation
The video "Parallel Structure | A Quintilian Institute Special Presentation" introduces the concept in a very clear, conceptual way.
Watch the first few minutes, focusing on two parts: The analogy: The speaker compares parallel structure to setting a dining table. Pay attention to how consistency creates both elegance and clarity. The examples: Notice the "before and after" examples and how fixing the parallel structure makes the sentences more direct and logical.
As you saw, faulty parallelism disrupts the reader's flow. Correcting it often involves making sure the items in a list are all of the same "type": all nouns, all verbs, all gerunds (-ing words), or all infinitive phrases (to... words).
Let's reinforce these grammatical patterns with another short video that provides simple, clear-cut examples.
Parallelism: The secret to great writing
This video, "Parallelism: The secret to great writing," breaks down the benefits and the fundamental grammatical rules of parallelism.
Watch from the beginning to see why this is considered a critical skill in professional writing. Focus on: The benefits: The instructor lists how parallelism adds weight, balance, rhythm, style, and clarity. The patterns: Pay close attention to the simple examples showing parallelism with verbs, gerunds, infinitives, adjectives, and nouns.
In short, the basic rule is: match your structures.
- Not Parallel: The director wanted to create a visually stunning film and that it would be an emotional journey. (infinitive phrase + clause)
- Parallel: The director wanted to create a visually stunning film and to take the audience on an emotional journey. (infinitive phrase + infinitive phrase)
- Also Parallel: The director wanted the film to be visually stunning and emotionally resonant. (adjective + adjective)
2. Identifying and Correcting Faulty Parallelism
Now that you understand the principle, the next step is to train your ear and eye to catch parallelism errors. They can be subtle, but once you start looking for them, they become much easier to spot.
Let's go through some guided practice. The quiz in the video we just watched is an excellent way to see this process in action.
Parallelism: The secret to great writing
Let's return to "Parallelism: The secret to great writing" for the interactive quiz portion.
Watch the section from the quiz. For each sentence, try to spot the error yourself before the instructor explains the correction. This will help you internalize the patterns. Notice how often there is more than one way to fix a sentence.
Your Turn to Practice
Now, it's time for you to be the editor. The following document contains a set of sentences that all have parallelism errors.
[PDF] Aggie Grammar Guide: Parallel Structure
This guide from UC Davis provides a great set of exercises to hone your skills.
First, navigate to the "Intermediate Practice" section. Revise the 10 sentences provided to make them parallel. Write down your corrections. There might be several ways to fix each one, so choose the version that sounds best to you. After you have attempted all 10, scroll down to the "Answer Key" for the Intermediate Practice section to compare your revisions. Read the explanations to solidify your understanding.
3. Parallelism as a Stylistic Tool in Journalism
Fixing errors is one thing, but consciously using parallelism is what elevates writing from merely correct to compelling. In evaluative writing, like a film or album review, parallelism is a powerful tool for structuring an argument and delivering a memorable verdict.
Consider this example from a hypothetical review:
The script was predictable, the acting was wooden, and the cinematography was uninspired.
The parallel structure (clause, clause, and clause) creates a rhythmic, damning triad that is far more forceful than a less structured sentence like:
The script was predictable, and I thought the acting was wooden. The cinematography also seemed uninspired.
The research paper below analyzes how parallelism works in newspaper headlines to persuade and influence the reader. While it's an academic text, the examples are highly relevant.
[PDF] Parallel Structure: Influential Tool in Newspaper Editorial Headlines
This paper highlights the rhetorical power of parallelism in a journalistic context.
Focus on two parts: Find Table 8: Faulty Parallelism. Look at the "Faulty" and "Repaired" versions of the headlines. Notice how the repaired versions are not only grammatically correct but also punchier and more memorable. Read the "Discussion and Conclusion" section. It emphasizes that parallelism helps make a writer's work stand out, increases readability, and can influence the reader—all key goals in entertainment journalism.
As the paper shows, parallelism adds rhythm, clarity, and emphasis. It helps you build an argument, draw a contrast, or deliver a final judgment with style.
4. Application to Your Capstone Project
Now, let's apply this technique to your own writing.
- Open the revised draft of your capstone article from our last lesson.
- Perform one more line-editing pass, this time searching specifically for parallelism.
- Your task is twofold:
- Find and fix any faulty parallelism that may have slipped into your draft. Look for unbalanced lists or comparisons.
- Find opportunities to create parallelism. Where can you restructure a sentence to add more punch or clarity? Look for places where you list an artist's strengths, a film's weaknesses, or compare two different works.
Goal: Identify and revise at least three sentences in your draft to improve them with parallel structure. Focus on the sentences that deliver your core arguments or evaluations.
For example, you might turn this:
The album's lyrics are insightful, and it has complex melodies, but the production feels a bit dated.
Into this:
The album boasts insightful lyrics and complex melodies, but suffers from dated production.
This revision is tighter, more rhythmic, and places the three evaluative points on equal footing, making the critique clearer and more forceful.
Conclusion
In this lesson, you've moved from understanding parallelism as a rule to using it as a tool. By balancing the grammatical structure of your sentences, you can create prose that is not only clearer but also more rhythmic and persuasive. This is a hallmark of professional writing craft.
Key Takeaways:
- Parallel Structure is about balancing related ideas in a sentence by using the same grammatical form (e.g., all nouns, all
-ingforms). - Faulty Parallelism disrupts rhythm and clarity, making sentences feel clumsy and confusing.
- In evaluative writing, parallelism is a powerful rhetorical tool for adding emphasis, building arguments, and creating memorable statements.
- Actively look for opportunities to use parallelism during your line-editing pass to make your writing more polished and impactful.
In our next lesson, we will shift our focus from the prose itself to its presentation. We'll explore how to adapt your final piece for an online audience, focusing on scannability and an engaging digital tone.