If you’ve ever worked a jigsaw puzzle, you’ve probably tried to put two pieces together that didn’t fit. Why did you choose to try those two specific pieces? Likely, the pieces had some similar features. People make errors in parallelism for the same reason. Let’s talk about how you can make sure all your “sentence pieces” fit together correctly.
Parallelism: On rainy days, I enjoy assembling jigsaw puzzles, baking pies, and knitting.
Notice that the sentence contains three gerunds: assembling, baking, and knitting. All the pieces match!
Faulty Parallelism: On rainy days, I enjoy assembling jigsaw puzzles, knitting, and to bake pies.
Here, “to bake pies” doesn’t match the other two gerunds.
You’ll want to employ parallelism correctly to have grammatically sound sentences. When you use the correlative conjunction pairs “either . . . or” and “not only . . . but also,” the two parts must be parallel. How would you correct this sentence?
Chilly days mean not only staying inside but also to bake pies and to knit.
There are a couple of ways to make it work. You can change the infinitives to gerunds:
Chilly days mean not only staying inside but also baking pies and knitting.
Or you can eliminate the correlative conjunction:
Baking pies and knitting—that’s what chilly days mean!
Writers also have trouble with list items. Every item in a list should belong to the same grammatical category. See if you can find the items that don’t quite fit in these two sentences.
The service technician said that I will need four things: restart the router, wait ten minutes, turn the router back on, and prayer.
The student decided to go with a high-tech career such as a software engineering, database administration, data scientist, or product development.
In the first sentence, the only thing (noun) mentioned is prayer. The other verbs are out of place. The second sentence lists three types of careers and one specific job title.
What is the key to avoiding parallelism mistakes? Think back to the last jigsaw puzzle you put together. For the pieces to correctly align, the tabs (pieces that stick out) must exactly fit the blanks (indentations). So as you write, make sure that all the elements of the sentence match one another.
from Grammarly Blog
http://www.grammarly.com/blog/2015/how-to-correct-parallelism-problems-in-sentences/
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