Parallelism
I would be extremely grateful for any assistance that you can give. Maybe there is no easy solution: I want to explain to someone that a series of steps or a list needs to have the same sort of “sense”. One instance is that all steps start with a verb expressed in the same way.
Here is a very simple example of what I mean:
The last one should obviously be “Close the door”.
I’ve heard this called parallelism (I think). It isn’t immediately clear what is meant by “parallelism”. If that is the correct term, it will be totally lost on my developers whose grasp of English is tenuous to say the least (although they do try).
Can you possibly give me some sort of explanation/instruction I can use in these circumstances? I can keep fixing the text, but I really would like to try to explain what should be done.
The word is, indeed, “parallelism” — and I agree that it’s a poor choice. I would prefer “structural consistency”, but that’s a mouthful.
Anyway, what it boils down to is that the grammatical arrangements in all the list elements should be essentially the same. In your example, the problem with “Closing the door” can be described in several ways, but the simplest is that the first two elements are expressed as imperative clauses (instructions), while the third is expressed as a noun phrase (rank-shifted non-finite clause... which you probably don’t want to know!)
Perhaps the simplest advice is this: It should be possible to “wrap around” some extra words, in such a way that exactly the same words can be used in each case. In your example, you could wrap “Please ... for me” around each example. It works for the first two, but not for the third — so the third has to be changed. Alternatively, think of each as the answer to more-or-less identical questions: “What do I do first / next?” In your example, the third step answers a slightly different question: “What is the next step?” The questions need to be the same (apart from sequencing information like first / next).
Why is this important? It’s because of the way readers build information structures in their heads. Each step of a procedure (for instance) needs to be seen in the same information context as every other step. Since grammatical structures are information structures (though not all information structures are grammatical), this means that each step or element has to fit into the same “surrounding” structure. This can still work if the elements aren’t fully consistent, but it can’t be guaranteed; the only sure way is to make them as consistent as possible.
Longer, more complex list elements can still be assessed this way, though it can be a little harder to see the principles working. For example:
To attach the whatsit to the thingy:
In this case, the information relationships are a little more complex. Only the first sentence is the actual step; you could precede it with “The first (second, third) step is to ...”, or you could think of it as the answer to “What do I do first / next?” The second sentence is additional information relevant only within the context of its own step, so the three second sentences do not have to “match” each other. Each gives more specific information about its first sentence, answering potential questions: “Where is it? How do I do that? How do I know if it’s right?”
As always, the key to clear writing is to think of what’s going on in the reader’s head. What questions will the reader ask? Ideally, we should answer those questions before they get asked — make the flow of information seamless, so that the reader doesn’t even realise that there is an opportunity to ask a question. So it’s more a matter of “What questions will the reader ask if we don’t pre-empt them by giving the answers in advance?”
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