Question

does this sentence use strong parallelism? select the best answer.

prior to the hurricane, residents packed up their house, boarded up their windows, and they were driving out of town quickly.

answer

no, this sentence does not use strong parallelism.
yes, this sentence uses strong parallelism.

Explanation:

🆕 New Concept Discovered: Parallel Structure in Writing
Matching grammatical forms in a list.

Step 1: Identify the list items in the sentence

The sentence contains a list of actions performed by the residents:

1. "packed up their house"
2. "boarded up their windows"
3. "they were driving out of town quickly"

Step 2: Analyze the grammatical structure of each item

Let's look at the grammatical form of each action in the list:

• Item 1: "packed up..." $

ightarrow$ Simple past tense verb phrase (verb + preposition + object)

• Item 2: "boarded up..." $

ightarrow$ Simple past tense verb phrase (verb + preposition + object)

• Item 3: "they were driving..." $

ightarrow$ Independent clause containing a past progressive verb (subject + auxiliary verb + present participle + prepositional phrase + adverb)

Step 3: Evaluate for parallelism

For a sentence to have strong parallelism, all items in a list must share the same grammatical structure.

Because the first two items are simple past tense verb phrases, the third item breaks the pattern by introducing a subject ("they") and changing the verb tense to past progressive ("were driving").

To make the sentence parallel, the third item should match the first two (for example: "...packed up their house, boarded up their windows, and drove out of town quickly"). Therefore, the sentence does not use strong parallelism.

Answer:

No, this sentence does not use strong parallelism.