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Express Parallel Ideas in Parallel Grammatical Form
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3. Express Parallel Ideas in Parallel Grammatical Form
Parallelism is the principle that units of equal function should be expressed in equal form. Repetition of the same structure allows the reader to recognize parallel ideas more readily:
no: This could be a problem for both the winners and for those who lose.
yes: This could be a problem for both the winners and the losers.
no: Output from VM appears in the output display area. The input area is where commands typed by the user are displayed.
yes: Output from VM appears in the output display area. Commands typed by the user appear in the input display area.
Note that any two (or more) units of discourse—words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, chapters—can be made parallel with one another. Note also that, although it is a powerful rhetorical device, parallelism is only one of many factors writers must consider as they compose. Hence, parallelism is occasionally overridden by other, more pressing considerations, such as clarity and variety.
4. Place the Emphatic Words at the End of the Sentence
Joseph Williams offers two complementary principles of order and emphasis (Style, 1st ed.):
1. Whenever possible, express at the beginning of a sentence ideas already stated, referred to, implied, safely assumed, familiar—whatever might be called old, repeated, relatively predictable, less important, readily accessible information.
2. Express at the end of a sentence the least predictable, least accessible, the newest, the most significant and striking information.
no: Peter Laslett writes about how family structure has changed in his article, "The World We Have Lost."
yes: In his article, "The World We Have Lost," Peter Laslett writes about how family structure has changed.
In the first version, the emphasis is on the title of the article; in the second version, the emphasis is on the substance of the article. Note that according to the two principles above, what justly needs emphasis in a sentence generally depends upon what has already been said or what is already known; that is, upon the given information. When the given information is placed at the beginning of a sentence, it is understated and serves as a transition or introduction to the new information in the sentence, which is thereby emphasized.
What Haviland and Clark call the "Given-New Strategy" not only creates proper emphasis within a sentence, it also creates cohesion between sentences since the new information of one sentence often becomes the given (or old) information of the next. Schematically, the movement of given to new information in a series of sentences might look like this:
AB. BC. CD. DE
Look, for example, at the following pair of sentences:
Lines that contain printer-control characters will not look right-justified on your screen. They will be right-justified, however, when you print them.
In the first sentence, the given information is lines (A), and the new information is right-justified (B). In the second sentence, the given information is right-justified (B), and the new information is when you print them (C).
Although the end of the sentence is generally the most emphatic position, as Strunk and White point out in The Elements of Style, "The other prominent position in the sentence is the beginning. Any element in the sentence other than the subject becomes emphatic when placed first: Deceit or treachery he could not forgive."
A little bit of this inverted style, however, goes a long way-use it sparingly.
5. Express Statements in Positive Form
The positive form of a statement is generally more concise and straightforward than the negative:
no: Don't write in the negative.
yes: Write in the affirmative.
no: Disengagement of the gears is not possible without locking mechanism release.
yes: To disengage the gears, you must first release the locking mechanism.
As Joseph Williams points out, "To understand the negative, we have to translate it into an affirmative, because the negative only implies what we should do by telling us what we shouldn't do. The affirmative states it directly" (Style, 1st ed.).
Williams goes on to point out that we needn't translate every negative into an affirmative, for (as this sentence illustrates) we sometimes have a special reason to emphasize not, no, or never. The negative is especially effective when used as a means of denial, contradiction, or antithesis:
Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.
6. Vary Sentence Patterns
A series of sentences that follow the same general pattern (e.g., a series of three or four simple sentences or a series of three or four compound sentences) can be tedious. Avoid monotony by varying sentence patterns.
One of the best ways to avoid a tedious series of simple sentences is to use subordination (or embedding) to combine the information presented in these sentences into a single, complex sentence. For example,
FLIST is a utility program used to assist in file management. FLIST displays a scrollable, full-screen list of selected files. The user may execute any CMS command from this list.
becomes
FLIST, a utility program used to manage files, displays a scrollable, full-screen list of selected files from which the user may execute any CMS command.
Another way to avoid a series of simple sentences is to use coordination (the tying together of language elements that have equal rank, such as independent clauses) to combine several of these sentences into a single, compound sentence. For example,
You can initialize CADAM from any System E terminal. You can invoke CADAM only from the 3178 terminals.
becomes
You can initialize CADAM from any System E terminal, but you can invoke CADAM only from the 3178 terminals.
Compound and complex sentences can themselves, however, become tedious. And sometimes, they're just plain awkward or confusing. Don't overload your sentences or your readers. If you find a sentence is becoming too long and confusing, or if you've used three or four complex sentences in a row, reverse the process described above and break your sentence up into several shorter sentences.
Note that although sentence variety is illustrated here only in terms of sentence type, this same principle applies to other sentence features, such as sentence openings and sentence length.
One of the best ways to discover problems with sentence variety is to read your writing aloud. Human language is primarily oral/aural and only secondarily graphic/visual; hence, most of us have a better ear for language than we have an eye for it. In fact, reading your writing aloud can help you discover problems not only with sentence variety but also with order and emphasis, parallelism, coherence, redundancy, syntax, rhythm, and grammar.
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