3 of 18

What’s wrong with this sentence?

The reasons steel companies kept losing money were that their plants were inefficient, �high labor costs, and foreign competition was increasing.

4 of 18

Parallelism

Saying Like Things in Like Ways

5 of 18

What is it?

Parts of a sentence that are parallel in meaning should be parallel in grammatical structure:

EXAMPLE:�� The chef chopped the parsley, peeled the potatoes, and cut the zucchini into cubes.

Verb (past tense)	Article	Noun (direct object)
chopped peeled cut	the the the	parsley potatoes zucchini

6 of 18

Faulty Parallelism

One or more items does not match the others in grammatical structure:�

The reasons steel companies kept losing money were that their plants were inefficient, � high labor costs, and foreign competition was increasing.

�

NOT PARALLEL

CLAUSE SUBJECT	CLAUSE PREDICATE
their plants high labor costs foreign competition	were inefficient was increasing

7 of 18

Correcting Faulty Parallelism

SOLUTION: Change the non-parallel phrase to match the others.

The reasons steel companies kept losing money were that their plants were inefficient, � labor costs were high, and foreign competition was increasing.

�

CLAUSE SUBJECT	CLAUSE PREDICATE
their plants labor costs foreign competition	were inefficient were high was increasing

8 of 18

Correcting Faulty Parallelism

SOLUTION: Change the others to match the non-parallel element.

The reasons steel companies kept losing money were inefficient plants, high labor costs, and increasing foreign competition .

�

ADJECTIVE	NOUN PHRASE
inefficient high increasing	plants labor costs foreign competition

9 of 18

Practice

Where’s the faulty parallelism?