Booher BanterBusiness Communication Consultant

I’ll admit it right upfront:  I’m not the best at parallel parking. Mark me down for at least two or three tries on each occasion. But when it comes to thinking, I show marked improvement.

Why’s this so important? Parallelism leads to comprehension. Without it, confusion reigns.

Yet, otherwise very bright people make parallelism errors often in their speeches, in their slides, in their emails, and in their client proposals. Such errors are as jarring as misspelled words—and far more dangerous. Readers and listeners recognize and “auto-correct” misspellings for you. But with parallelism errors, the audience often doesn’t know there has been a miscommunication until later when something goes awry.

Unparallel Sentence in a Speech or Document

“I want to thank you for consulting with us on the project, the ZRT implementation plan, discussing marketing strategy for the new product line, and setting goals for our technical team.” (Question:   How many things is the speaker here thanking someone for? Three? Four?)

The pesky problem here is parallelism. Is the “ZRT implementation plan” a reference to the project? Or is that a separate item the speaker is referring to? If it’s a separate item, the structure should match the other items in the list:  “consulting,… reviewing the ZRT implementation plan, … discussing, … and setting….

Parallelism simply means that equal ideas should get equal weight. That is, a speaker or writer should present them in a similar way so that they match.

Unparallel Structure on a Slide

You can take advantage of these benefits as a new member of our organization:

• Networking opportunities with your peers
• Complimentary webinars and teleconferences with experts in the industry
• Learn new skills at monthly educational sessions
• You will gain visibility with your own management team as a dedicated professional interested in your own career development.

Granted, no one would misunderstand the benefits on the slide above with the four bullet points. They just look “mismatched” as a list of two noun phrases, a command, and declarative sentence.

But this list looks like the person who comes to work wearing a brown shoe, a black shoe, red socks, and purple shirt. This “mismatched” list is hard to skim quickly and suggests lazy thinking.

Okay. So much for helping you with parallelism in presentations and writing. Any tips for me on parallel parking?

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