Does my sentence have parallelism?
"He criticizes public schools because they are compulsory, government-funded, and destroying students' humanity."
3 Answers
Not much
The only parallel construction here is in the three attributes the speaker assigns to schools: "compulsory, government-funded, and destroying students' humanity." each of these links with "are", so the construction is parallel to that degree. But the attributes are expressed with different forms. The word "compulsory" is a simple adjective. the term "government-funded": is compound, and uses an -ed form that suggests a past action, although not in this case, but that reduces the parallelism. And "destroying students' humanity."uses a gerund form "destroying" which is at least awkward and arguably incorrect here.
He criticizes public schools because they are compulsory, government-funded, and they destroy students' humanity.
would be better, in my view, but still not very parallel.
answered Dec 7, 2020 at 16:11
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one more thing can you please tell me if this sentence sounds right?"Good health requires right eating and regular exercising." It's clear that it's parallel but I can't tell if it's correct otherwise Commented Dec 7, 2020 at 16:33
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@Qasim "right eating" is an unusual and awkward phrase in US English at least, but this should really be a separate question. Commented Dec 7, 2020 at 16:37
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No, the last coordination
compulsory, government-funded, and destroying students' humanity
connects two adjectives and a clause.
This would be parallel:
compulsory, government-funded, and humanity-destroying.
That would be three adjectives, though the last adjective doesn't convey the same meaning as "destroying children's humanity".
It would be better to rephrase the original sentence:
"He criticizes public schools because they are compulsory and government-funded, and are destroying students' humanity."
answered Dec 7, 2020 at 16:12
He criticizes public schools because they are compulsory, government-funded, and destroying students' humanity.
No, this sentence currently doesn't show parallelism. You can rephrase it as follows:
He criticizes public schools because they are compulsory, government-funded, and humanity-destroying.
Now all three terms are adjectives which is how you would form parallelism in this case. Either all adjectives or all nouns or all prepositional phrases, etc.
answered Dec 7, 2020 at 16:21
