Superficial Parallelism Vs Actual Parallelism

By Abhishek Tomar on Aug 24, 2009 with Comments 1

GMAT is very good in parallelism sentences. How good you may think you are but GMAT has tools to fool you. How to safe guard you from GMAT tricks? The best tool to safe good yourself is to know all the rules of parallelism. The advance level rule of parallelism is to be aware of superficial parallelism.

To preserve parallel structure, it is important to pay more attention at grammatical structural – verb phrases, noun phrases, preposition phrases, adverbial phrases, etc. For Example

James traveled around the world, visiting history sites, eating native foods, and learning about new cultures.

In the above example we can easily say that sentence is correct, this is because phrases such as “visiting history sites” “eating native foods” and “learning about new cultures”. But there is twist in the above sentence “traveled around the world” is not parallel to the above verb phrases. TRAVELED is the main word hence all the phrases should provide the information about James travel. This statement can be corrected like this:

James traveled around the world, visited historic sites, ate native foods and learned about new cultures.

This version of the above sentence give equal weightage to all the activities. Another version /of the above sentence that is correct is:

James traveling around the world, visiting history sites, eating native foods, and learning about new cultures.

BEING – To be watch for

The most common form of verb is Being. In GMAT Being is used in many forms. It would be good to have the knowledge of all form of TO BE. Here is the table for TO BE, Learn and Mug it up.

When you see any form of TO BE ( or any form of BEING), be sure that all the phrases of the sentence should be parallel

Example

The flower bouquet WAS the husband’s giving of the love to his wife

The two sides of the sentence “flower bouquet” and “husband’s giving of the love”. These two sides are not parallel, so how to make the two side parallel. We can rewrite the two sentences by replacing GIVING with the noun GIFT to make it balance.

The flower bouquet WAS the husband’s loving gift to his wife.