What is parallelism?
Parallelism, also known as parallel structure, is an important part of English that makes our speaking and writing easier to unerstand. To make speech or writing parallel, put all items in a series in the same grammatical form.
*Last weekend, I bought a new computer, painted my bedroom, and made strawberry jam.
**The prisoner was arrested, taken to the police station, and booked and fingerprinted.
*Notice how all three verbs in the predicate are in the simple past and active voice.
**Notice how all three verb phrases are in the passive voice.
When you write sentences that have a string of nouns and articles, you can put the article before each noun or just before the first noun. Note that it is more common to put the article before each noun.
On her shopping trip, Mrs. Scott bought a book, a jacket, and a DVD.
Jack had a sandwich, juicebox, and apple for lunch.
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