PARALLEL construction is one of our most powerful tools for organizing and presenting ideas. Indeed, it cannot be overemphasized that making our sentences grammatically and semantically correct is simply not enough. We should also ensure that each of their grammatical structures that are alike in function follows the same pattern, for the observance of this basic stylistic rule very often spells the difference between good and bad writing.
To give us a much better idea of the power of parallel construction, let us first examine the following simple sentence: "Alberto likes reading, jogging, and to play computer games." It is structurally disjointed and it doesn't read well because not all of its serial elements follow the same pattern. Although the first two elements, "reading" and "jogging," are in parallel because both are gerunds ("-ing" noun forms), the third, "to play computer games," ruins the parallelism because it's an infinitive which is a dissimilar form ("to" + the verb stem).
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