? Tasteful
? In the less-populated section of his kingdom
The first three are adjectives, but the last is a prepositional phrase. (For
more information about prepositional phrases, see Chapter 8.) Because they
don’t match, the sentence is not parallel. In sentence B, the three adjectives
are alone in one sentence. The prepositional phrase is in its very own sen-
tence. Sentence C expresses all the characteristics of Larry’s honeymoon
suite as adjectives.
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Chapter 21: Parallels Without the Lines 285
To avoid parallelism errors, you don’t have to know the correct grammatical
terms. Just use your common sense and listen. A parallel sentence has bal-
ance. A non-parallel sentence doesn’t.
Shifting Grammar into Gear:
Avoiding Stalled Sentences
If you’ve ever ridden in a car with a stick shift, you know that smooth transi-
tions are rare (at least when I’m driving). If something is just a little off
Golden Virginia Tobacco, the
car bucks like a mule. The same thing is true in sentences. You can, at times,
shift tense
cheap youth nfl jerseys, voice, or person, but even the slightest mistake stalls your sen-
tence. In this section, I explain how to avoid unnecessary shifts and how to
check your sentence for consistency.
Steering clear of a tense situation
Check out this sentence with multiple verbs:
Larry begs Ella to marry him
usa made cigarettes, offers her a crown and a private room, and
finally won her hand.
Now make a list of the verbs in the sentence:
? Begs
? Offers
? Won
The first two verbs are in present tense, but the third shifts into past for no
valid reason. Stall! If the verbs in this sentence were gears in a stick shift
monster dr dre, your
car would conk out. All three verbs should be in present tense or all three
should be in past tense. Here are the corrected versions of the sentence:
Larry begs Ella to marry him
dre dre Headphones, offers her a crown and a private room, and
finally wins her hand. (All three verbs are in present tense.)
or
Larry begged Ella to marry him, offered her a crown and a private room,
and finally won her hand. (All three verbs are in past tense.)
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286 Part IV: Polishing Without Wax — The Finer Points of Grammar
Sometimes in telling a story, you must shift tense because the action of the