In last week’s post, I highlighted an unusual number of flaws in just two sentences of an online article. One of those flaws, a breakdown in parallel construction, deserves more illumination because many of us found the topic tedious back in school, and now we wish we had been paying more attention. Here’s your chance to catch up on the importance of keeping your wording on track.
Exhibit A
Lack of parallel construction can be especially apparent in a bulleted list.
We need to take care of the following by Friday:
• Invite Jill to chair the task force.
• Select one person per department to serve with her.
• Establishment of date for first meeting. (Uh-oh. This construction doesn’t agree with the first two.)
But that inconsistency is simple to fix, right? Once our antennae become attuned to this common oversight in workplace writing, we can quickly do the repair work. In this case, we merely need to change “Establishment of” to “Establish.” Now all three bullets move along parallel tracks: Invite, Select, Establish. And we have other easy ways to accomplish the same end, such as starting each bullet with a noun or present participle (“-ing” verb).
We need to take care of the following by Friday:
• Invitation to Jill to chair the task force.
• Selection of one person per department to serve with her.
• Establishment of date for first meeting.
We need to take care of the following by Friday:
• Inviting Jill to chair the task force.
• Selecting one person per department to serve with her.
• Establishing the date for the first meeting.
Exhibit B
Another way to go off the rails when composing bullets is expressing some items as complete sentences and others as fragments.
Three statistics jumped out at me when I read the year-end report:
• Our fourth-quarter sales eclipsed third-quarter sales by 18 percent.
• The 14 percent rise from 2013 to 2014 in part-time help.
• Transportation costs were the lowest they’ve been since 2009.
See the problem? The middle bullet is not a complete sentence, but the other two are. This lapse can distract the reader, seem like an error, and even slow down reading speed and comprehension because the reader needs to keep switching gears.
Again, if we just keep our focus to make sure we don’t go off-track, the remedy is simple. Here is parallel construction by choosing to go with complete sentences.
Three statistics jumped out at me when I read the year-end report:
• Our fourth-quarter sales eclipsed third-quarter sales by 18 percent.
• Part-time help during the summer rose 14 percent from 2013 to 2014.
• Transportation costs were the lowest they’ve been since 2009.
And here is nearly identical content, but the style choice is sentence fragments.
Three statistics jumped out at me when I read the year-end report:
• The sales jump of 18 percent from third quarter to fourth quarter.
• The 14 percent rise in part-time help during the summer compared to 2013.
• The decrease in transportation costs to the lowest they’ve been since 2009.
Next week we’ll wrap up our review of parallel construction by illustrating lapses within individual sentences. Meanwhile, stay on track to enhance the elegance of your writing and give your readers a smooth ride.
In addition to presenting workshops on writing in the workplace, Norm Friedman is a writer, editor, and writing coach. His 100+ Instant Writing Tips is a brief “non-textbook” to help individuals overcome common writing errors and write with more finesse and impact. Learn more at http://www.normfriedman.com/index.shtml.