Engish Vinglish - II

Parallelism

We are coming with more checks, more fines, more often

                __Tagline of Yarra Trams’ (Melbourne) drive against ticket-less travel.

Is this catchy l tag line is grammatically wrong ?  Hard to believe.  Grammarians say  it is parallelism ;  you should not mix adjectives and nouns  in a sequence. 

Faulty parallelism is when the different elements, though grammatically correct by themselves, do not mesh properly in one sentence. While some parallelism is barely noticeable, others can be quite jarring.  Examples of fault parallelism could be:

1.          Including gerunds and infinitives in a list
2.          Adjectives and nouns in a list
3.          Changing from passive voice to active voice or vice versa .
4.          Changing from second person to third person arbitrarily
5.          Changing from present tense to past tense  etc. etc.

While it is nobody’s case that all writing must be straight-jacketed into one style and catchy phrasism  should be given up in favor of technicalities, care should be taken that sentence formation is free from confusion. It is sheer laziness to start off a sentence by composing thoughts in one way and then suddenly change path mid stream.

To digress a  little, it is ironical that western culture that worships  order and method has given birth to the English language that offers so much latitude and flexibility while the eastern culture, the birthplace of intuition and non-linear thinking , has languages that have strict structure and rules that preclude such sentence construction.  Examples are Tamil and Sanskrit, about the later I know very little except that it has  strict rules of grammar  that makes it suitable for parsing and compiling into object code when used to write computer programs. 

Let us see some examples :

·         Customers may either pick up the merchandise themselves, or the company may deliver  it to them for a small fee.

When you use ‘either/or’ , the elements of  the sentence must be parallel.  Starting off the sentence with ‘Customers may’ sets up the expectation that the sentence speaks of options before the customer.  Changing the sentence mid stream to “the Company may” is faulty parallelism.

“Customers  may either pick up the merchandise themselves, or have it delivered for a small fee” is better.

·         In Australia, SAP consultants  who work as contractors may not get regular pay checks and SAP Projects are just a few , but one gets the benefit of extra tax breaks.

Here the writer is arbitrarily jumping from plural (consultants) to singular (one). 

“Consultants who work as contractors may not get regular pay checks, but they get the benefit of extra tax breaks”

Or

“As a consultant one does not get regular pay checks, but one gets the benefit of extra tax breaks”.

·         As the Project Manager  his responsibilities were the management of the Project and to evaluate performance of team members.

Here “management” is a noun while “to evaluate” is an infinitive.

“As the Project Manager his responsibilities were the management of the Project and the evaluation of the performance of the team members.”

·         The Infocube will require indexing when the values in the tables have fragmented or to correct the skewing of values.

Here the writer has arbitrarily changed from what should be done to the tables of the Infocube ( passive voice) to what the person who is maintaining the system needs to do ( active voice).

“The infocube will require indexing when the values in the tables have fragmented or when a correction of skewed values is required.”

·         Go to the options menu to change the  default parameter values , set the customized tool bar, or  insert graphic objects to the form.

Here the writer has meant to use the verb ‘change’ only to default parameter values but gone on to including setting the customized toolbar and  insertion of graphic objects.

“Go to the options menu to change the default parameters; set the customized tool bar or to insert graphic objects to the form.”

·         At the end of the design phase, we should have not only delivered the Blue Print Documents but also the Functional Specifications for the items in the list of custom developments.

When using  ‘not only …. but also’,  ‘not only’ must be placed immediately before the series of values.

At the end of the design phase, we should have delivered not only the Blue Print Documents but also the Functional Specifications for the items in the list of custom developments.

·         During the realization phase, it may be necessary to either add or subtract from the list.

Here the problem is one of inconsistent usage of the preposition.  ‘from’ is not appropriate for ‘add’. 

During the realization phase, it may be necessary to either add items to or subtract items from the list.

This is the first installment. I may add more to the same blogpost as I come across more such examples. In the next post we shall look into ‘faulty modifiers’.