"Bonny ... played cricket, loved the beach and water-skiing" (Wilcox, K., 2013, ¶ 6. The deletion is ", pictured, " which refers to a picture we don't need. I will ignore this in the following variations on the sentence).There is no problem understanding this, but readers stumble a bit as they move along the sentence. It isn't smooth, even if we aren't sure why. As it's written, it's grammatically incorrect, which is sometimes a good thing, but probably not what Katrina Wilcox and her editors intended. One correction, perhaps the most obvious, would be to insert another and:
Bonny played cricket, and loved the beach and water-skiing.This has strictly fixed the grammar, but we might not like it. It's awkward and messy with those ands stuck in to hold it together. A better solution is to put the three component ideas in parallel:
Bonny played cricket, loved the beach and water-skied.A more sophisticated version, but getting a bit more formal, could be:
Bonny loved to play cricket, go to the beach and water-ski.
Bonny loved playing cricket, going to the beach and water-skiing.
Cricket playing Bonny loved the beach and water-skiing.And thinking about grammar errors reminded me of The New York Times article I used when we practised writing reference citations. Everything in "When Spell-Check Can’t Help" is an example of mistakes or bad style committed by New York Times writers (Corbett, 2012). Finally, I often have to confess, when making final corrections to your work, that I'd missed something on my first proofreading - just as many minor mistakes in the NY Times don't get noticed even by their professional and highly experienced proofreaders. In fact, the After Deadline blog (Yes, it's a blog.) on the NY Times is devoted to examples of language mistakes that their writers make, whether it be of grammar, vocabulary, punctuation, or something else.
__________
Reference
Hartmann, P. & Blass, L. (2007). Quest 3 Reading and Writing (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Wilcox, K. (2013, January 25). Cancer ad shown in cinemas often leaves young audiences in tears. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved January 28, 2013 from http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/cancer-ad-shown-in-cinemas-often-leaves-young-audiences-in-tears-20130124-2d9o4.html
After reading this blog post, I found that I might made a wrong decision on whether parallelism help making a sentence clearer. The sentences you described as "a more sophisticated version",for me , is far more difficult to understand than the grammatically incorrect one. ToT
ReplyDeleteMay be writing is like works of art that the sophisticated one means it is beautifully created but always hard to understand?
Air,
DeleteI expected that version to be more difficult. In order to remove one part of the idea out of the parallelism, it uses some grammar that is not normally used outside of academic or literary writing - the use of participle phrases, which many native speakers outside of academia never use and have trouble using correctly, as the eyebrows example in the NY Times article I cite shows.
I liked the last version I offered, and I thought that the SMH writer might have: it allows him to keep the two part parallelism linking the complementary ideas of beach going and water skiing, whilst removing the cricket to another part of the sentence.
I think the actual parallelism is still OK. It's the participle at the beginning that is more of a challenge.
For me, I still think that parallelism is not always bad, because it links your ideas and make them clearer.
DeleteActually, when I read the blog, I thought it's Ok, because I understand the author's idea.
It's not easy for non-native speaker to differentiate what sentence is good or strange sometimes.
Yes, Air, sometimes the language in writing is beautiful but hard to understand. But what is more important between beautiful or concise and clear language?
Mo makes a good point.
ReplyDeleteIn academic writing, clarity and precision rate most highly, although other style factors contribute to those. Academic varieties of English use a much larger range both of grammar and of vocabulary because its necessary to effectively and accurately express their ideas and their relationships. The same is true, I am sure, of the academic versions of every other language.
Parallelism is a useful and used stylistic form in academic writing because it helps to achieve the primary purpose of clearly and accurately communicating ideas to an audience.