Sentence Correction

shakas wrote:Hi everyone,

I have two questions concerning parallelism :

1) is it correct to have two parallel clauses in which one does have an appositive phrase and the other doesn't?

To put it bluntly, is the sentence "X, who is mr Y lawyer, Y, and Z,who is a congressman, play soccer in Manchester United" correct?

I took an example with appositive phrases, but the question is the same for clauses with infinitive, prepositional, participal or gerund phrases. (By the way, is this parallelism correct? ^^)


2) I have problems spotting clauses that need to be parallel:
In the sentence "I believe that A and B", in which A and B are clauses, I think I only need to make sure that A and B are parallel. But when I look at solutions, it seems that not only A and B must be parallels, but also the solution must be "I believe that A and that B"
Could someone make that clear for me?

Thank you.

Dear shakas,
I'm happy to help.

First of all, be careful not to confuse appositive phrases with any noun modifier.
Tom, my lawyer, ... = an appositive
Tom, who is my lawyer ... = a relative clause
For more on appositives, see:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/gmat-gramm ... e-phrases/

Let's just talk about noun modifiers in general, a.k.a adjectival clauses. For more on these, see:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/gmat-gramm ... d-clauses/

If I have two nouns in parallel, it is perfectly correct for one of them to have a noun modifier and the other to be unmodified. OG13, SC #110 (p. 692) has an OA that uses this very structure.

Admittedly, with three items in parallel, it's a bit awkward to have noun-modifiers for two and have the third unmodified, and it's particularly awkward to stick the unmodified one between the two with modifiers. That's more an issue of rhetoric than basic grammar.

The second question gets into the question of common words. One of the points of parallelism is that one does not need to repeat common words in the second branch. Suppose I want to say:
I believe that stock ABC will rise next week.
and I also want to say
I believe that stock XYZ will fall next week.

It would be far too wordy to say:
I believe that stock ABC will rise next week and that stock XYZ will fall next week.
Without repeating the "next week" phase, by stashing it at the beginning of the sentence, we make significant improvements:
Next week, I believe that stock ABC will rise next week and that stock XYZ will fall.
That's better, but still not crisp.
I believe that, next week, stock ABC will rise and stock XYZ will fall.
That's a crisp, direct, powerful sentence.
There are two ways to look at the grammar of this last sentence. One is to say that we have the two "that"-clauses in parallel, and we are omitting the common word "that", which is perfectly permissible in parallelism.
Another is to say we have two clause in parallel inside the "that" clause. Think about it --- anything that can work as a stand-by-itself complete sentence can follow the word "that" (or any subordinate conjunction) and be a legitimate subordinate clause. Well, the words ---
Next week, stock ABC will rise and stock XYZ will fall.
... form a complete sentence on its own; as it happens, the complete sentence has two independent clauses in parallel. Therefore, it's perfectly legitimate to put the word "that" in front of this complete sentence and form a valid subordinate clause.
In either analysis, using only one "that" is perfectly correct.

Here's a blog about a related topic you may find helpful:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2013/gmat-paral ... ce-inside/

Let me know if you have any further questions.
Mike