Question

Which sentences correctly use parallel structure? When things go wrong, Carl tends to brood for hours and to blame others. After watching some TV, I was talking to my daughter and read e-mail. The school was closed not only because of the snow and ice but also because of the lack of heat. The ice was a greater problem for the electrical power company than for the natural gas company.

Answer 1

Parallelism is the process of repeating a grammatical form in the sentence. Each idea must follow the same grammatical pattern. In this question When things go wrong, Carl tends to brood for hours and to blame others is a correct option because it is grammatically correct parallelism. After watching some TV, I was talking to my daughter and read e-mail is not an example of parallelism because of the irrelevance of the tenses. The school was closed not only because of the snow and ice but also because of the lack of heat is parallelism because we have the same grammatical structure in each part with this conjunction. The ice was a greater problem for the electrical power company than for the natural gas company - In this clause of comparison the structure of parallelism is also correct.

Answer 2

The sentences that use parallel structure are the first two sentences:

When things go wrong, Carl tends to brood for hours and to blame others. After watching some TV, I was talking to my daughter and read e-mail.

For sentences to be considered parallel, they will need to have similar construction. If we look at these two sentences, we can see they both begin with subordinate clauses and are followed by independent clause. It is because these two sentences have identical structure that they are considered parallel.