Use Parallel Sentence Structures to Avoid Everlasting Damnation
The path to Hell is paved with bad inflections
Let’s face it: you’re not just a bad writer, you’re a bad person. A bad person, because you know your writing is sin, yet you publish anyway. Shame. Shame!
Fear not, however, for I bring you good tidings of great joy: The Grammar Messiah is here, preaching the gospel of effective usage. Repent, therefore, ye den of writerly vipers.
Parallel structures are knocking on your heart
Blogging is an abomination against journalism, so there is little hope for your redemption, ye false columnist. Nevertheless, to the uninitiated, your asinine blog can pass as a genuine authority if you employ parallel structures in your sentences.
So what, precisely, is a parallel structure? Consider the following sentence:
“The blogger abides in insentient hell, mute and uncomprehending.”
The adjectival phrase “mute and uncomprehending” presents two ideas of equal importance — it is parallel conceptually. Thus, it must be parallel grammatically (it is) for the sentence to read fluidly. Happily, the author of our example sentence knows his way around The Holy Usage Bible, because it’s his own inerrant…
