Parallel structures

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Many sentences in academic texts are quite complex in terms of argumentation and in terms of structure. To ensure that your complex sentences remain easy to understand, it is good to make use of parallel structures: making use of similar patterns to express ideas that have a similar value. Here is an overview of what can go wrong.

Contrast

Keeping the same structure while contrasting specific elements allows the different meaning involved to stand out. By contrast, if you do not employ parallel structures you may produce a weaker rhetorical effect. Here is an example of a less than ideal formulation:

(1) In public they continued their duties together, but they led separate private lives.

There is a clear contrast here between public and private life, which can be brought out better in the following rewritten version:

(1a) In public they continued their duties together; in private they led separate lives.

Now, in public and in private both come at the beginning, while together and separate occur at or near the end.

Uniformity in lists

When you link words and phrases with and, or make a list of three or more items, then the elements of the list should be uniform, both in syntactic and semantic terms. Here is an example of a badly formulated list.

(2) This model basically consists of four steps: question interpretation, retrieval of the attitude, rendering a judgment, and reporting an answer.

From a syntactic point of view, the first two items in the list involve what are called nominalizations, i.e. nouns made from verbs (interpretation comes from interpret, retrieval from retrieve), while the second two have the -ing forms of verbs. By changing the first two members of the list to interpreting the question and retrieving the attitude, the list becomes uniform and the emphasis is on action, which is more in keeping with the notion of four steps.

Here is another example, this time involving a problem of semantic uniformity:

(3) Before the capacity of Schiphol can be increased, the airport has to deal with the problems of the neighbourhood: devaluation of houses, serious mental problems, sleeping problems, high blood pressure and other health problems.

The list here includes economic and health terms. There is a lack of semantic uniformity in that devaluation stands a bit on its own, and on top of that a strong impression is created that it is mainly about health problems [cf. other health problems]. It might be an option to divide the problems into two parts:

(3a) Before the capacity of Schiphol can be increased, the airport has to deal with the problems of the neighbourhood: economic problems like house devaluation and health problems such as lack of sleep, high blood pressure, and even serious mental problems.

This solution first of all involves making a two-way split between economic problems and health problems, and then gives examples of each, so that each part of the resulting coordination has the same structure. There is also a reordering of the examples of health problems so that the most serious example comes at the end, where it has most rhetorical weight.