Recently, I happened to meet an aspiring writer, who wanted to talk and discuss the book he is planning to write. We spoke over the phone, exchanged some ideas, and ultimately decided to meet at a coffee shop to sit down and talk about his plans and intentions. On meeting him, I noticed that he was an enthusiastic lad, who was really looking forward to this meeting speaking about his book, and getting his book out soon in the market. We spoke for an hour or more and I could see that his ideas really had the potential to become a bestseller. His plot had all the essential ingredients of a novel readers would definitely pick it up and I told him to immediately start working on writing his manuscript. But before that, I asked him to send me a sample chapter, the most interesting part of his book just to see if his thoughts were in sync with his writing. Having listened to his brilliant plotline, I did not want this idea to go unnoticed and in vain because of a poor writing style. Within a week, I got a mail from him with the sample chapter I had asked for. All excited to see how his ideas had taken shape, I sat down to read his work but I was soon left dejected. As I read through the sample, I noticed something that I’ve been spotting in a lot of writing now. I’ve seen this error being made in a lot of manuscripts. It is then that I decided that a blog post on this was due. Authors have been unconsciously making this mistake and this has to be avoided if books are to be well received. Its called issues arising out of lack of parallelism in writing.

Parallelism

A lot of brilliant ideas have appeared flawed and the potential sales of several books have stalled because of this crucial aspect called parallelism. Technically, parallelism is the balance between words, sentence structures, phrases, or logic. A simple example of a flawed case of parallelism is this sentence “ He likes to read and writing. Did you notice how the flow of this simple six-worded sentence disrupted the inside of your mind because of lack of parallel phrasing? The case can be as simple as this one to flaws in complex sentences that come in some of the most prime parts of a novel. When sentences are not parallel, it influences the readability of a passage or a paragraph and has a direct impact on the experience of a reader. Now read the right way to phrase example sentence from earlier “ He likes to read and write or he likes reading and writing. Don’t these sound better? They do because the sentence is parallel in terms of its structure and construction.

Now in a 250-page manuscript of over 40,000 words, imagine the pain a reader has to endure when he or she reads something that has major parallelism issues. As an author, you need to understand that a single great idea, a brilliantly designed cover or an effective marketing strategy alone cannot nail your success in the market. Real success depends in your writing and to drive home this point, we have to have impeccable command over grammar, which includes parallelism.

In short, parallelism issues can:

• immensely affect the readability of their work
• make paragraphs, chapters, or dialogues ambiguous
• make readers doubt your skills as a writer
• mislead readers to comprehend something that you did not intend to convey
• stall the sales of your book and kill its readership

Writers, as you have seen and experienced, make mistakes. When you write, your hands just bleed thoughts that strike you and you care least about the sentence construction, structuring, syntax, and other aspects of grammar. We feel we can come back and proofread our content and make necessary changes; but what we tend to overlook are issues of parallelism because at the outset, the sentences make sense. But when read from the perspective of fresh eyes, the readability takes a hit. So, to avoid issues of parallelism, we’ve come up with a list of major mistakes a writer is likely to make and come up with a list below.

Parallelism Issues

If you have the chance to read any blog with mediocre language, you will notice that the content will have any or all of these parallelism issues.

Subject-Verb Agreement

One of the most common reasons for parallelism issues is the disagreement between the subject and the verb in a sentence. Writing is one of the best feeling on earth. Noticed the green squiggly line the word-processor has thrown at us? That is because the subject and the verb in the sentence did not agree with each other. Now, a lot of aspiring authors I know tend to undermine the importance of the errors the word-processor throws. A lot of writers tend to submit their manuscripts with these squiggly lines, leaving the issues of parallelism unsolved. This is a basic grammatical error, which makes a huge difference in the way readers perceive us and our writing. So, to avoid this, make sure your sentence is parallel in terms of subjects and verbs.

Tip Singular subjects take singular verbs and plural subjects take plural verbs.

Pronoun-Antecedent

The heat of the war was evident on each warrior’s face. The squad of archers was all ready for the orders from their general and when he commanded, they pulled out their arrows from his quivers and set about firing them.

There are no squiggly lines on this sentence, but is the sentence correct? Doesn’t it bring about ambiguity in your mind somewhere? Don’t you feel there’s something in this sentence that doesn’t seem to fit right? Though the sentence makes sense (barely), the error here is the pronoun-antecedent disagreement. Here, the writer has made an error in the sentence structure that will leave readers puzzled. The sentence implies that each archer from the squad pulled out an arrow from the quiver of the general and set about firing. This means that the general would be left with no arrow at all. What the writer intended to convey was that the archers pulled out their arrows from their quivers and set about firing them. Instances like these go unnoticed when we proofread our work because the processor does not show an error. So, as a writer, you have to pay attention to details like these and fix the errors in parallelism relating to pronouns and antecedents.

Gerund-Infinitive

The power of gerunds and infinitives can be felt in this one phrase “ While Daniel stopped smoking last week, Fred stopped to smoke yesterday. Notice that the writer wanted to imply that both characters did the same thing, but at different times but used a gerund for one and an infinitive for the other. Perhaps the writer wanted to avoid redundancy in his writing but what he has brought in is ambiguity. This is a classic example of a good intention gone wrong! Doesn’t the sentence say that Daniel quit smoking last week and Fred stopped to smoke, as if he was driving to somewhere, stopped on the way just to smoke? That’s gerund-infinitives for you. Errors like these popup frequently when writers intend to add variety to their writing. And the best part is, the word processor will not report an error, too, because the sentence is grammatically correct. It is the execution of the thought that has gone wrong. So, in your manuscript, if you’ve made similar mistakes with gerunds and infinitives, fix them immediately, as they would leave readers confused about the story line and the plot.

Tense

This is one of the major issues a lot of writers face but they continue to make tense shifts without realizing the mistakes they’ve made and the impact these mistakes have on their writing. The tense should be consistent in each sentence and paragraphs and any change in tense shift should be logical. Unnecessary tense shifts only negatively impact the reading experience and comprehensibility of readers. Now imagine I had written the first sentence of the paragraph like this “ This was one of the major issues writers face and they had continued to make tense shifts. Notice the tense going from ground zero to level one and then coming back to zero? Doesn’t the sentence sound irritating? Consider this again “ My friend wouldn’t have failed in her exams if she is not going to visit her friends before the exam. Annoying? Totally! We’ll tell you why. So, if the tense is inconsistent in a sentence or throughout a paragraph or a chapter, can the reader even understand anything? Haven’t the writer’s thoughts and efforts in writing a book gone in vain? To avoid this, maintain a consistent tense and make your content parallel.

Logic & Ideas

In many cases an idea a writer proposes in the beginning of his book is contradicted by him or her in the end. This causes inconsistencies in parallelism with regard to the logic of the book and makes readers think as to why even the writer decide to write in the first place. This is the case in genres like murder-mystery and thrillers where parallelism issues cause loopholes in the plotline. Any form of idea-contradiction by the author or a lack of logic or disagreement between scenes and episodes in a book lead to parallelism issues. While the above mentioned parallelism issues can be dealt by the writer, to make logic and ideas airtight, what the writer can do is finish his work and have an editor go through the work. A pair of fresh eyes can immediately spot logical inconsistencies, loopholes, and contradicting ideas in a book. Though these types of errors pop up rarely, they immensely affect the quality of the book when they do.

What seemed to have appeared as an insignificant issue before this article now appears to be humongous, right? Errors in parallelisms, when taken as standalone issues, may appear minor. But imagine a series of issues appearing in the manuscript. Don’t the issues trigger a dominos effect and affect the book ? Now that we know about the parallelism issues we are more likely to make, it is on us to take charge and keep an eye out to eliminate them. If you want to get started with an exercise on parallelism concerns, pull out something that you’ve written previously and pay attention to imbalances in the manuscript.