Day 247: Use parallel construction in lists.

Parallel construction means all the items have the same grammatical structure. For example, all the items may be complete sentences, or all the items may start with present tense verbs.

In a list, you have multiple items. Each of those items needs to be parallel. Consider this list, with an opening statement.

广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元

Our books provide exceptional value:
 
  • Reasonable price,
  • High-quality content,
  • You can buy them on-line.

 

 

 

 

While each of these statements might be true, they have been expressed poorly. As you can see, the first two items have an adjective followed by a noun. The last item is an independent clause. As such, this list has a problem with parallelism. To fix this, we change the final item to “available online.” We could change the first two items instead, but this will add many words.

If your list items are not parallel, not only will you have an error but also the text will read poorly.