In grammar, parallelism, also known as parallel structure or parallel construction, is a balance within one or more sentences of similar phrases or clauses that have the same grammatical structure.[1] The application of parallelism affects readability and may make texts easier to process.[2]
Parallelism may be accompanied by other figures of speech such as antithesis, anaphora, asyndeton, climax, epistrophe, and symploce.
Compare the following examples:
| Lacking parallelism | Parallel | |
|---|---|---|
| "She likes cooking, jogging, and to read." | "She likes cooking, jogging, and reading." "She likes to cook, jog, and read." | |
| "He likes to play baseball and running." | "He likes playing baseball and running." "He likes to play baseball and to run." | |
| "The dog ran across the yard, jumped over the fence, and sprinted away." | "The dog ran across the yard, jumped over the fence, and sprinted down the alley." |
All of the above examples are grammatically correct, even if they lack parallelism: "cooking", "jogging", and "to read" are all grammatically valid conclusions to "She likes", for instance. The first nonparallel example has a mix of gerunds and infinitives. To make it parallel, the sentence can be rewritten with all gerunds or all infinitives. The second example pairs a gerund with a regular noun. Parallelism can be achieved by converting both terms to gerunds or to infinitives. The final phrase of the third example does not include a definite location, such as "across the yard" or "over the fence"; rewriting to add one completes the sentence's parallelism.
See also: Parallelism (rhetoric). Parallelism is often used as a rhetorical device. Examples: