Writing: need an explanation

lotf629
Mon, 28 May 2007 22:43:50 +0000

P.S. It’s not a parallelism error. Parallelism is only an issue when you have items in some kind of series: “I went swimming, biking, and running” contains a series of verbs, so we can’t write, “I went swimming, biking, and for a run.”

When one element of the sentence is dependent on another element of the sentence, parallelism is not an issue. We could say “I was studying to improve my grades” because the phrase “to improve my grades” is supposed to describe your studying; it tells us why you were doing it. It’s not in the same series; it’s a modifier. Therefore, we do not have to write, “I was studying, improving my grades” or “I was studying and improving my grades.”

In the sentence from your test, the second part of your sentence (beginning “which”) is not in a series with the first part; it’s dependent, so it doesn’t need to be parallel.