THE mark of good writers is their ability to set their ideas in parallel, not simply the richness of their thoughts and the depth of their grammar knowhow. They can competently construct sentences by using basic grammar structures that can clearly and unmistakably convey the sense and meaning of what they have in mind.
The general rule for achieving parallelism is simply this — that all of the grammatical elements a sentence enumerates or presents in serial succession must have the same form and common structure. This applies to all the parts of speech in English, from articles and prepositions to nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs as well as to the verbals — the infinitives, gerunds, and participles. How scrupulously the parallelism rule is applied greatly determines the readability and persuasiveness of sentences.
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