A well balanced and grammatically equal sentence serves to help the reader.
If two or more parts of a sentence are equal in meaning but not in form, it slows comprehension:

❌ The candidate’s goals include winning the election, a national health program, and the educational system.
✅ The candidate’s goals include winning the election, enacting a national health program, and improving the educational system.

❌ Harry likes to run, swim and go biking.
✅ Harry likes to run, swim and bike.

Properly composed sentences match nouns with nouns, verbs with verbs, and phrases or clauses with similarly-constructed phrases or clauses.

A well-written sentence creates a sense of rhythm and balance within a sentence. As readers, we often correct faulty parallelism intuitively because an unbalanced sentence sounds awkward and poorly constructed

Lists can also suffer from faulty parallelism. For example:

❌ Our conclusions
❌ Finally, recommendation

These should read:

✅ Draw conclusions
✅ Make recommendations

The same applies to lists after a colon:

❌ A dictionary is used for the following: word definitions, pronunciation with phonetics, correct spellings, and looking up irregular verbs.
✅ A dictionary is used for the following: definition, pronunciation, spelling, and structure.

In each example, word forms should be consistent. Whether you are using gerunds, plurals or adverbs, balance is important:

❌ The production manager was asked to write his report quickly, accurately, and in a detailed manner.
✅ The production manager was asked to write his report quickly, accurately, and thoroughly.

If something is breaking the rhythm in the sentence, change it.


Learn more about common mistakes, with our course Common Grammar Mistakes or  view a range of our online courses.

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Adverbs have a habit of reducing impact:

• This house is very expensive.
  

Fortunately, some give strength and life. We can see that [very] adds no extra information; it’s not exactly life giving.

However, there is a little family of adverbs who are perfect for communicating subtleties, imprecision or uncertainty. The modality family are cautious with their words and are invaluable because they add further information:

• This house is definitely worth buying.
  
• She clearly researches her reports.
  

Whereas [very] does not enhance, [definitely] and [clearly] add information.  

So, before you throw out the whole adverb family, remember, everyone has a talent.

Here are a few of members of the family:

• feasibly
• cautiously
• probably
• certainly
• irrefutably
• distinctly
• necessarily
• perhaps

Modality is the difference between a factual assertion and a cautious view:

• This is an expensive watch.
  

versus

• This appears to be an expensive watch.
  

Let words speak for themselves: cultivate the habit of using adjectives and adverbs to make your meaning more precise, and be careful of those you find yourself using to make it more emphatic.


Understand how to make a definite or indefinite statement or commitment,
and how to express yourself with our online course:

• Hedging and the art of cautious language

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One way to give examples, although indirect, is to tell stories. This gives information in a way which is easier to understand, which dramatises a situation and makes it more interesting.

Don’t repeat for example every time you give an example. Excite your audience with colour and depth!

🧁 Sample
We use sample to talk about a small part or quantity to show what the whole is like:

• Let me give you a sample of our new product range.

🖥 Instance
We use this when giving a single occurrence of something or for a particular case:

• Here’s a fantastic instance of how our service can help small businesses.

⚓️ Case
Used as an instance of a particular situation:

• In many cases, we help customers when they  need it most.

🖼 illustration
We use this to clarify our example:

• Our standards are not as good as we think. The cleanliness of our public areas is a good illustration.

🛋 a case in point
Used for an instance or example which illustrates what is being discussed:

• Customer satisfaction is a case in point. We need to make improvements as there have been complaints about the quality of our furniture.

Learn more about how to give examples, take a short course:

• Giving examples

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- MAKING WORDS MATTER -