A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
2. Style
Parallelism, Passives, Redundancy, and Wordiness
THIS chapter deals with some common writing problems that do not involve rules of grammar. These problems—of parallelism, redundancy, and the like—are more rhetorical than grammatical; that is, they involve choices you must make as a writer trying to create a certain style of expression. You must determine what stylistic choices will afford greater clarity and cogency to each of your efforts to communicate. We all make different choices when faced with different communicative tasks depending on what we feel will be most effective. An expression that is appropriate for a formal letter may be utterly off-putting in an informal message.
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Of course, we also have to make these choices when we speak, but we are more likely to be aware of them in formal speech that we have conceived and outlined, if not scripted, in advance of its delivery than in off-the-cuff remarks or a routine conversation. And no doubt the audience in these more formal situations will have more exacting expectations of how we express ourselves than it would on more relaxed occasions.
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A successful and distinctive writing style is an elusive bird of paradise. It is unmistakable once you see it but difficult to find. It involves many things: creating an appropriate voice for your purpose, choosing the right words for the subject and audience, constructing elegant sentences whose rhythm reinforces their meaning, presenting an argument in a logical fashion that is both engaging and easy to follow, finding vivid images to make thoughts accessible to your readers. You can probably add to this list. You may, for example, want to shock or jolt your audience rather than court it, and this strategy requires stylistic features that are quite different from those you would use for gentle persuasion.
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The trouble with writing is that despite what many handbooks suggest, there are no hard and fast rules, no magic formulas, that make it an easy step-by-step process. You have to reconceive the rules every time you sit down to write because every occasion has its own specific requirements. Writing for university students is different from writing for business associates. Writing for older people is different from writing for teenagers. Writing about medicine is different from writing about sports. Writing to explain is different from writing to persuade.
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At the same time, it is this challenge that makes writing so interesting and rewarding. It is a process of discovery, an exploration of uncharted territory.
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And there are tools you can bring with you that will make the journey easier: a familiarity with your audience and your material, a sensitivity to words and their connotations, and a map of some of the pitfalls that have befallen others. We present one version of this map in the pages that follow.
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Parallelism
Most memorable writing has as one of its recognizable features the ample use of parallel grammatical structures. Consider these selections from famous political documents:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. (The Declaration of Independence)
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. (The Gettysburg Address)
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. (Winston Churchill’s tribute to the Royal Air Force after the Battle of Britain)
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These celebrated passages are moving in no small measure because of their elegant cadences and parallel structures. Both The Declaration of Independence and The Gettysburg Address contain a series of that-clauses whose rhythm reinforces the gravity of what is being said and puts great stress on the final elements in the sentence. In both passages the final elements themselves are constructed in parallel fashion. Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness is a series of nouns, with the last modified by a prepositional phrase. Government of the people, by the people, for the people presents a noun modified by a series of prepositional phrases, each with the same object so that the prepositions—commonplace words that usually have little meaning aside from connecting words together—have enormous significance and the word people is reinforced, thus emphasizing its underlying importance to the idea of government. Similarly, Churchill’s famous line ends with a series of pronouns modified by the intensive so, which is repeated three times with prepositions indicating the relationship between the many (the British people) and the few (the heroic pilots).
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A basic guideline about parallel constructions is to make sure that all the elements in a balanced pair or in a series have the same grammatical form. That is, if you start with a that-clause, stick with that-clauses; if you start with an infinitive, stick with infinitives; if you start with a participle, stick with participles; and so on. What you don’t want is a mixed bag, as in She had a strong desire to pursue medicine and for studying literature or The scientist asked for volunteers with allergies but who had not given blood recently.
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A second point is to make sure that once you have chosen the kind of grammatical forms you want to make parallel, you structure them symmetrically. Remember that an initial article, preposition, auxiliary verb, or modifier will tend to govern all elements in the series unless it is repeated for each element. For example, if you set up a series of nouns with the first modified by an adjective, the reader will expect the adjective to modify the rest of the series as well. Thus you should say The building has new lighting, plumbing, and carpeting but not The building has new lighting, plumbing, and different carpeting. The same is true for articles: He brought the rod, reel, and bait. If you want to restrict a modifier to only one noun, repeat the article for each noun: He brought the light rod, the reel, and the bait.
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Similarly, if you introduce a series of nouns with a single preposition, readers will expect that preposition to govern all the nouns: He sent the letter to the provost, the dean, and the student who won the scholarship. With contrastive conjunctions, it’s best to repeat the preposition: He sent the letter to the provost and the dean but not to the student or his parents. An auxiliary verb will govern all the verbs in the series unless you construct each verb phrase separately: We will always value her contributions, admire her fortitude, and wish her the best.
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When you spot a faulty parallel, recast the structure to give all the elements equivalent treatment. If your new parallel construction does not seem much of an improvement, rewrite the sentence completely to avoid the parallel construction. Better to have no parallel structures than to have parallel structures that sound overblown or stilted.
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Faulty parallelism is all around us. We see and hear it every day—often without taking notice. How many times have you heard Please leave your name, number, and a brief message? After waiting for the tone, have you ever objected to the imperfect symmetry of this sentence? In our most recent ballot we presented some sentences with questionable parallelism to the usage panelists to see how tolerant they would be. As we expected, they had a range of opinions.
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Sometimes making sure that all the elements in a parallel construction are equivalent is not as clear-cut as it sounds, and parallelism itself can be a matter of debate. Is a series of nouns that has some gerunds in it parallel? On this problem the panel is divided. Fifty-one percent approve, while 49 percent reject the sentence The committee has the power of investigation, negotiation, arranging contracts, and hiring new employees.
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The panel is similarly divided when the first part of a compound verb has a series of objects, so that the second verb and its objects seem tacked on as the last element in the series. Fifty-four percent find unacceptable this example: These services will use satellite, copper cable, fiber optics, cellular communications, and be accessible via suitably equipped computers.
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In other cases the panelists are more unified. They apparently see little harm in the imperfect telephone message cited above. Eighty-six percent accept the following example in which three nouns in the series are governed by the possessive his, while the fourth and final noun is modified by the: In the hotel room the suspect had left his keys, briefcase, spare clothes, and the receipts for the cars he had rented. This construction in fact has the virtue of adding emphasis to the final element. The receipts seem to be the most important piece of evidence that the suspect left behind.
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When the situation is more clear-cut, however, and something in the construction is clearly out of balance, the panel is more insistent on restoring parallelism. This is the case with the coordinate conjunction not only … but also, where it is easy to spot when one element is out of place. Seventy-three percent reject the sentence The film makers not only concentrate on Edward VIII’s abdication over his love for divorcee Wallis Simpson but also his leaning toward Nazi Germany.
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Crafting sentences with flawless parallelism takes effort and practice. Even if your readers don’t notice or object when you make mistakes, balance and symmetry are worth striving for in your writing. There are certain constructions that are notorious for throwing things out of whack. We list some of them below.
Writing handbooks usually include warnings about the passive voice—it is wordy and clumsy and leads to static rather than dynamic writing. There is truth to this, certainly, but the passive voice also has legitimate uses, and in many instances it is preferable to the active voice.
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The grammatical form of the passive voice is discussed in detail in the verbs section of the chapter Grammar. To summarize: the passive voice refers to verb forms that allow the subject to be the receiver (rather than the performer) of the verb’s action. Passive verbs consist of a form of the verb be and a past participle: is needed, was bought, has been delivered.
A certain amount of redundancy is built in to the English language, and we would never consider getting rid of it. Take grammatical number, for instance. Sentences such as He drives to work and We are happy contain redundant verb forms. The -s of drives indicates singularity of the subject, but we already know the subject is singular from the singular pronoun he. Similarly, are indicates a plural subject, which is already evident from the plural pronoun we. Number is also indicated redundantly in phrases like this book and those boxes, where the demonstrative adjective shows number and the noun does as well.
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But there are redundant ways of saying things that can make the rest of your writing seem foolish. Many of these are common expressions that go unnoticed in casual conversation but that stick out like red flags in writing. Why say at this point in time instead of now, or because of the fact that when because will do? Something that is large in size is really just large. The trouble lies less in the expressions themselves than in their accumulated effect. Anyone can be forgiven for an occasional redundancy, but writing that is larded with redundancies is likely to draw unwanted laughs rather than admiration.
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The usages that critics have condemned as redundancies fall into several classes. Some expressions, such as old adage, have become fixed expressions and seem harmless enough. Others, such as consensus of opinion, close proximity, hollow tube, and refer back, can be pointlessly redundant in some contexts yet defensible in others. In these cases the use of what is regarded as an unnecessary modifier or qualifier can sometimes be justified on the grounds that it makes a real distinction in meaning. Thus a hollow tube can be distinguished from one that has been blocked up with deposits, and a consensus of opinion can be distinguished from a consensus of judgments or a consensus of practice. In other cases the use of the qualifier is harder to defend. There is no way to revert without reverting back and no consensus that is not general.
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Listed below are some of the more problematic redundancies.
In a world in which efficiency has become a prime value, most people view economy in wording as a sign of intelligence. Its opposite, therefore, is often considered a sign of stupidity. Most of us are busy and impatient people. We hate to wait. Using too many words is like asking people to stand in line until you get around to the point. It is irritating, which hardly helps when you are trying to win someone’s goodwill or show that you know what you’re talking about. What is worse, using too many words often makes it difficult to understand what is being said. It forces a reader to work hard to figure out what is going on, and in many cases the reader may simply decide it is not worth the effort. Another side effect of verbosity is the tendency to sound overblown, pompous, and evasive. What better way to turn off a reader?
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It is easy to recommend concision in expression but much harder to figure out how to achieve it. In general, wordy writing has three distinguishing characteristics: weak verbs, ponderous nouns, and lots of prepositional phrases. The three are interconnected.
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The key to writing clearly and concisely is to use strong active verbs. This means that you should only use the passive voice when you have a solid reason for doing so. (For more on this, see passive voice in this chapter and verbs, voice of under Grammar.) If you look down a page you have written and see that you are relying on forms of the verb be and other weak verbs like seem and appear, you can often boil down what you have written to a fraction of its size by revising with active verbs.
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Relying on weak verbs forces you to shunt much of your meaning into nouns. These nouns tend to be abstract and Latinate, ending in -ment, -tion, and -ence. The nouns themselves need a proper grammatical home, and the only way to show how they relate to other parts of the sentence is to put the nouns in prepositional phrases. Here is an example:
It is essential to acknowledge that one of the drawbacks to the increased utilization of part-time employees is that people who are still engaged full-time by the company are less likely to be committed to the recognition and identification of problems in the production area.
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This passage has 45 words. We can boil it down to 14 by cutting out the unnecessary words, using active verbs, and using noun modifiers to do the work of prepositional phrases:
Using more part-time employees often makes full-time employees less willing to report production problems.
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Just as you can count weak verbs to test for wordiness, you can also count nouns in relation to active verbs. If there is a preponderance of nouns, consider revising the passage with strong verbs. It should be considerably shorter.
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But in your efforts to write clearly, you must not lose sight of the fact that good writing has other virtues beside compactness. Just because a statement is concise does not make it moving. Consider the following passage from a speech by Winston Churchill voicing defiance during one of the most difficult times of World War II. It could certainly be made shorter with fewer repetitions, but it would hardly be more inspiring:
We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
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A certain amount of repetition and redundancy has its uses. It never hurts to thank someone and add that you appreciate what was done. The recapitulation of the major points in a complicated essay can be a generous service to the reader, not a needless repetition. If you keep focused on what you are trying to accomplish and on what will help your readers or your listeners, you will have less need to remember formal rules of good writing. You will be able to trust your instincts and your ear.
