Question

which sentence is least parallel? select the best answer.

answer:

• by tomorrow, the cookies need to be baked, cooled, and packaged.
• she doesnt like eggs, tomatoes are tolerated, and another type of food she hates is bell pepper.
• before locking up, you need to take out the trash, sweep the floor, and turn off the lights.

Explanation:

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

Step 1: Understand Parallel Structure

Parallel structure (or parallelism) means using the same pattern of words to show that two or more ideas have the same level of importance. This usually happens in a list.

If you list items, they should all share the same grammatical form (for example, all verbs, all adjectives, or all noun phrases). A sentence is "least parallel" if it breaks this pattern by mixing different grammatical structures.

Step 2: Analyze the Options

Let's look at the structure of each sentence:

• Option 1: "By tomorrow, the cookies need to be baked, cooled, and packaged."
• List items: "baked" (past participle), "cooled" (past participle), "packaged" (past participle).
• Verdict: Highly parallel. All three items are in the exact same grammatical form.

• Option 2: "She doesn't like eggs, tomatoes are tolerated, and another type of food she hates is bell pepper."
• List items:

1. "She doesn't like eggs" (Subject + negative verb + object)
2. "tomatoes are tolerated" (Subject + passive verb)
3. "another type of food she hates is bell pepper" (Complex noun phrase + verb + singular noun)

• Verdict: Not parallel. The three clauses joined in this list use completely different grammatical structures, making the sentence awkward and unbalanced.

• Option 3: "Before locking up, you need to take out the trash, sweep the floor, and turn off the lights."
• List items: "take out the trash" (base verb + object), "sweep the floor" (base verb + object), "turn off the lights" (base verb + object).
• Verdict: Highly parallel. All three actions follow the same verb phrase pattern.

Step 3: Identify the Least Parallel Sentence

Option 2 completely breaks parallel structure by mixing different clause patterns to list her food preferences. A parallel version would be: "She dislikes eggs, tolerates tomatoes, and hates bell peppers."

Answer:

She doesn't like eggs, tomatoes are tolerated, and another type of food she hates is bell pepper.