Resolve To Get Organized

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Image by Ag Ku from Pixabay

We’re now well into the later part of January, but hopefully everything is still going well with your New Year’s resolutions. If you haven’t yet made one, you’re in good company—neither have I. But here’s a possibility: getting better organized. No, I’m not going to send the camera crew from Hoarders around to make you clean up your house—but how about better organization in your writing?

Last time we considered how to get sentences off to a good start. So let’s press onwards and look at some principles that will help you better organize multiple elements within a sentence or across several sentences.

How does this sentence scan?

Riding out to Cape Canaveral to see space launches, watching hummingbirds, and tennis are some of my favorite pastimes at our new home in Florida.

Something’s not quite right here—or at least not very good. But what is it? Look at the subjects—there are three of them: Riding out to Cape Canaveral to see space launches, watching hummingbirds, and tennis. And the most complicated one is mentioned first: Riding out to Cape Canaveral to see space launches. Since it’s a phrase, it takes the reader’s brain a little while to process, and when it turns out that it’s part of a still longer phrase, the result can be confusion or at least subconscious annoyance at having to work so hard to read an apparently simple sentence. (Another problem is that the three subjects are not fully parallel, which we covered in this post. But let’s leave that aside for the moment.) 

If, on the other hand, we start out with the simplest of the series and progressively get more complicated, look how much easier it makes the reading:

Tennis, watching hummingbirds, and riding out to Cape Canaveral to see space launches are some of my favorite pastimes at our new home in Florida.

Here the subjects get more complex as they go—the first is just one word; the second, a two-word phrase, and the longest phrase of all the subjects comes last. So here’s the first principle: simple, then more complex. If you need a good example to help you remember this principle, just think of those famous words from the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Let’s look at another principle that’s useful when considering how sentences flow from one into another. Check out this example:

The vet believed that my cat Fiona had labyrinthitis. Fiona had been having trouble with her balance, so that made sense since the condition affects the inner ear.

Again, this example is not out-and-out wrong, but it doesn’t flow well. At the end of the first sentence we have a medical term, labyrinthitis. Most people probably will not understand it, so it could be a bit of a stumbling block. The reader has to keep going until the very end of the second sentence to find out that labyrinthitis affects the inner ear.

A better way is to start with words that are familiar to the reader and then introduce the unfamiliar medical term:

The vet believed that my cat Fiona had an inner ear disorder called labyrinthitis. Fiona had been having trouble with her balance, so that made sense.

Notice that this version is also “tighter”—that is, shorter—than the previous. And by leading up to the medical term by explaining it first, it’s more likely that the reader will be able to absorb it, instead of just skipping over it since it’s unfamiliar. So you can think of this principle as familiar, then new.

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Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Lastly, here’s a close relative of familiar, then new:

Spanish is relatively easy at first for English speakers, but its more advanced grammar can be difficult. Russian has a lot of inflectional endings to memorize. And of course Arabic has a completely different way of writing. It’s difficult to say which language is the hardest to learn because there are many factors to take into consideration.

How could this passage be improved? Look at how the first three sentences seem to be examples of a particular topic—but the topic itself doesn’t show up until the very end. Putting the topic first and then the examples makes for much smoother sailing:

It’s difficult to say which language is the hardest to learn because there are many factors to take into consideration. Spanish is relatively easy at first for English speakers, but its more advanced grammar can be difficult. Russian has a lot of endings to have to memorize. And of course Arabic has a completely different way of writing.

You could call this topic, then comment or topic, then examples.

So be on the lookout for examples, both good and bad, of         

            Simple, then complex

            Familiar, then new

            Topic, then comment (or examples)

out “in the wild,” and please share them below! I’ll be back next time with some grammatical devices that can help with putting these principles into practice. (Yes, grammar CAN be useful! 😊 )

Parallel Universes

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If you’re into science fiction, you’ve probably noticed that a very popular theme is that of parallel universes. The idea that there could be another reality containing an exact or near-exact duplicate of everything has a powerful pull on the imagination. And just this past spring, NASA scientists conducting experiments in Antarctica uncovered evidence that a parallel universe might in fact exist. 

Our brains like parallelism so much that it even carries over into grammar, of all things. What am I talking about? Have a look at these sentences and see if you can pinpoint what’s wrong with them: 

My hobbies are cooking, hikes, and to read.

The goals of the workshop are finishing a first draft of your novel and to proofread it.

Many people will recognize that something isn’t quite right with these examples, but they can’t figure out exactly what. The problem is that they are not parallel in structure. In the first example, cooking is a gerund (a noun formed from a verb by adding -ing); hikes is a plural noun, and to read is the infinitive form of the verb. To fix it, we have to make all three items in the list conform to one grammatical form. The solution here is pretty simple—we can use all gerunds:

My hobbies are cooking, hiking, and reading.

Lack of parallel structure might be a little bit harder to spot in the second example since the non-parallel elements are a bit further apart, but if you look closely, you’ll see that once again we have a gerund heading up the phrase finishing a first draft of your novel but the infinitive to proofread in the second phrase. This time let’s make them both infinitives to fix it:

The goals of the workshop are to finish a first draft of your novel and to proofread it.

The parallel versions read a lot better, don’t they? The reason this works so well is because our brains tend to hold what we’ve just read in short-term memory to use as a template for deciphering what comes next. When the grammatical forms are not similar, the mental processing takes longer.

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There are two other situations where you should always doublecheck to make sure your constructions are parallel. One is when you use paired conjunctions such as either…orneither…nornot only…but also (sometimes called correlative conjunctions). Here’s a sentence with correlative conjunctions that’s not parallel:

Either our business will pull through the economic downturn or we will have to close it.

Check out the first phrase: Either our business will pull through the economic downturn—the subject is business. But in the second, we will have to close it, the subject is we.

Here’s a possible solution, making we the subject of both phrases and business the object:

Either we will pull our business through the economic downturn or we will have to close it.

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And speaking of business, if that’s what you write for, you might use bullets to make lists easier to read. That’s a great idea—but to maximize the edge that bullets give your reader, you have to make sure—you got it—that they’re parallel.

Check out this non-parallel example:

Our new application guides you through every step of your vacation planning, including:

  • Choosing a destination
  • How to find cheap flights
  • Hotels and reservations
  • Where to eat
  • How do you know which are the best attractions   

Here we have many different kids of grammatical structures, and the constant shifting going on in your brain slows you down when you try to read them. Here’s one possible solution—and notice how in this case we have to reword some of the bullets in order to make them parallel:

Our new application guides you through every step of your vacation planning, including:

  • Choosing a destination
  • Finding cheap flights
  • Booking hotels
  • Selecting restaurants
  • Pinpointing the best attractions

Finally, parallel construction is not just a plaything for fussy grammar nerds; it’s an extremely effective literary device. Look for it in good literature and famous quotes, and you’ll soon start seeing it everywhere, such as:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

  – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“ …government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

 – Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

Parallel is powerful! Please feel free to share your favorite examples below.