Do you ever look at a sentence that doesn’t quite work, or doesn’t feel like it was written by a native speaker, but you’re not sure why? There’s a good chance it comes down to a misuse of parallel structure, or parallelism—a grammatical quirk that keeps prose moving along smoothly and cleanly.
But what do we mean by parallelism, exactly, and how can you incorporate it into your work to elevate your prose? We’ll take you through everything you need to know about what parallel structure means and how to master it in your writing.
What is parallel grammatical structure?
Parallel sentence structure means organizing a sentence or series of ideas into the same grammatical form. A successful parallel sentence structure means that everything in the sentence matches: nouns paired with nouns, ing-verbs with ing-verbs, and so forth. This makes the sentence more concise and easier to read.
For example, “Sandra Lonleyhart likes reading, shopping, and ice cream” is what’s called a faulty parallelism—its structure doesn’t quite match up. That’s because it lists three ideas, but two of them are verbs, and one is a noun (“ice cream”). To repair this faulty sentence, you can write it using a parallel construction with either all verbs or all nouns: “Sandra Lonleyhart likes reading, shopping, and eating ice cream” or “Sandra Lonleyhart likes books, clothes, and ice cream.”
By using a consistent grammatical form, the sentence reads more smoothly and naturally.
Why is parallel structure important for writers?
Parallel structures don’t just convey ideas in a clearer way; they make those ideas more emphatic and persuasive.
As we saw above, faulty parallels in writing aren’t always glaringly obvious. However, they do snag the reader’s attention and make them feel like something’s wrong. Remember: anything that pulls the reader out of your story is going to work to your detriment. By using parallelism in your writing, your story will move along more smoothly and keep your readers engaged.
This is even more essential in nonfiction writing like essays and articles. Because this type of writing is often geared at persuasion —convincing someone of a belief or idea—parallelism can help make these ideas feel more trustworthy and appealing.
Types of parallelism literary devices
Parallel structure can come in a few forms, and understanding them can help you use them more effectively in your writing. Here are the different ways parallelism can appear in both poetry and prose.
Anaphora
Anaphora is using the same words or phrases at the beginning of successive sentences. You see this a lot in poetry, as well as in famous speeches.
An example of anaphora is Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech: “So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania…” He uses parallelism to emphasize the point he’s trying to make and hold his audience’s attention.
Epistrophe
Epistrophe is the opposite of anaphora; it means using the same words or phrases at the end of successive sentences. A good example is the famous legal vow, “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Each of the clauses land on the same word, creating a strong and compelling rhythm.
Symploce
Symploce is a combination of anaphora and epistrophe. This type of parallelism gives a phrase, poem, or speech a cyclical sense of balance.
An example would be Bill Clinton’s famous speech:
When there is talk of hatred, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it.
He uses parallels at both the beginning and the end of these sentences. The repetition makes for a much more engaging speech than it would have been without the clever parallel construction.
Asyndeton
This is a rhetorical device in which the conjunction is removed in order to draw attention to the parallel elements. Remember, a coordinating conjunction is a word that links together separate words or ideas: and, or, but, so, etc. A correlative conjunction is a similar bridging word that compares words or ideas: either, both, as, like, and so forth. Asyndeton discards these minutiae to enhance its emphasis.
Look at the following example from a speech by John F. Kennedy:
We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
He doesn’t waste space on filler words; instead the parallel verbs of “pay”, “bear”, “meet”, “support”, and “oppose” command the listener’s attention.
Escalating parallels
Escalating parallelism is when the elements of a sentence or series of sentences match in grammatical form, but increase in intensity. This is a clever trick that makes the reader think that the information gets more and more important as it goes on.
A famous example of this kind of parallelism is a line from Shakespeare’s Richard III:
To-day, to-day, unhappy day, too late,
O’erthrows thy joys, friends, fortune and thy state.
The speaker uses parallelism to state that misguided actions will first lose you friends, then your financial stability, and then finally your kingdom. Each consequence is more serious than the last.
Antithetical parallels
Antithetical parallelism uses parallel grammatical elements to contrast two opposing ideas. This is especially popular in religious poetry.
John Milton uses antithetical parallelism in his poem Paradise Lost: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” The two clauses follow the same grammatical structure, yet convey completely opposite ideas. This type of writing makes for great marketing slogans (Milton’s line, above, is essentially a “Vote Lucifer!” marketing slogan), because it’s catchy and memorable.
Zeugma
A zeugma is a literary device in which a single word (usually a verb) is used in two parallel ways.
For example, “She kicked him out, and then he kicked the bucket” is a zeugma. The first refers to the action of forcing someone to leave, and the second is a euphemism for dying. Note that the example uses parallel sentence structure; they both use third-person pronouns and past-tense verbs.
Another example is a brilliant line from Star Trek:
You are free to execute your laws, and your citizens, as you see fit.
Here, “execute” is working twice as hard to give this moment depth.
Examples of parallelism from literature
To see how this looks in practice, let’s look at some parallelism examples from our favorite reads.
Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw
If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate.
In Shaw’s play, Professor Higgins offers the protagonist some words of wisdom that act as a turning point in Eliza Doolittle’s journey. This line uses inversion to create a mirror-like effect, which makes it memorable.
“Vacation ’58” by John Hughes
It wasn’t a big cliff. It was only about four feet high. But it was enough to blow out the front tire, knock off the back bumper, break Dad’s glasses, make Aunt Edythe spit out her false teeth, spill a jug of Kool-Aid, bump Missy’s head, spread the Auto Bingo pieces all over, and make Mark do number two.
This line from Hughes’ short story acts a little bit like an escalating parallelism. Even though the sequence of events doesn’t exactly get more serious, there’s just so many of them that it feels like the day gets worse and worse. The first two sentences use anaphora, or repeated opening words. Then, the paragraph uses a series of clauses which all use the same grammatical form: blow, knock, break, etc. Without the parallel construction, it wouldn’t have nearly the same impact.
“Litany” by Billy Collins
You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.
Parallel lines are a mainstay in poetry, as former US poet laureate Billy Collins demonstrates. This poem uses repeating parallel sentences to create a strong rhythm. “Litany” follows in the tradition of classical love poems, which incorporate parallelism in order to effectively describe the poet’s beloved.
How to fix a faulty parallelism
So with all that in mind, how do you create parallel structure in a struggling sentence? The trick is to break it down into its individual parts.
We saw above that sentence parallels normally happen in lists. Here’s an example:
“This summer when I was camping, I tried rock climbing, kayaking, and even foraged for mushrooms.”
Does this sentence work? Kind of, but it could be better. Look at what we have here: pronoun, past-tense verb, gerund (or ing-verb). You can create parallelism by ensuring each element follows this pattern.
In this case you have “I tried rock climbing” (pronoun/past-tense verb/gerund), “[I tried] kayaking” (pronoun/past-tense verb/gerund; the first two are implied), and “[I tried] foraged” (pronoun/past-tense verb/past-tense verb). To match the earlier parallelism, we can simply adjust the final element: “[I tried] foraging”.
Then, the final product looks like this:
“This summer when I was camping, I tried rock climbing, kayaking, and even foraging for mushrooms.”
What you can also do is give the list elements different past-tense verbs so that they stand on their own. For example, “This summer when I was camping, I tried rock climbing, went kayaking, and even foraged for mushrooms.” Now this sentence is a satisfying parallel because each one follows an independent pattern of pronoun/past-tense verb/gerund. Both versions are correct.
If you’re not sure, always ask yourself, “does every list element in this sentence follow the same grammatical construction?” If not, now you know how to fix it!
Parallelism helps tighten your writing
We encounter parallelism in our daily lives all the time. Even if we don’t recognize it consciously, we can instinctively know that the sentence feels right. Now with these tricks, you can avoid faulty parallelism in your writing and craft prose that shines.
