Grammar Girl here. I'm on vacation this week, so I have an extra short piece for you from Lester Kaufman and Tom Stern,

who recently released a new edition of the Blue Book of Grammar Impunctuation.

It's a great book and what sets it apart is that it has about 40 pages of quizzes,

and they've kindly provided a quiz to go with the article that accompanies this podcast,

which you can find at quickanddirtytips.com.

Here's what they have to say about parallel construction.

Bad grammar weakens good writing, but some bad writing is grammatically flawless.

Today, we'll discuss parallel structure and show how faulty parallelism can ruin a sentence

without breaking any rules of grammar. Self-editing is part of writing.

We could write, I wrote the letter, I signed the letter, I sent the letter.

But we discover at an early age that we don't need three sentences.

Instead, we compress the information into one sentence, I wrote, signed, and sent the letter.

That's where parallelism comes in.

When two or more elements wrote, signed, and sent are given equal consideration in the context of a sentence,

they should be as similar as possible.

Wrote, signed, and sent are all active verbs in the past tense, giving the sentence parallel structure.

That's what makes I wrote, signed, and sent the letter simple, direct, and clear.

Now consider this rickety sentence.

She lost her agent, publisher, and her books weren't selling.

That's like saying she lost A, B, and three.

What happened to C?

This is verbal bait and switch.

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