Anker Susan. Real Essays with Readings with 2009 MLA Update

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EDITING ESSAYS

Chapter 31 • Parallelism 557

7. However, an energy-efﬁ cient new refrigerator uses much less electricity

than running an inefﬁ cient older model.

8. Some new refrigerators use only as much energy as keeping a 75-watt

light bulb burning.

9. Householders might spend less money to buy an efﬁ cient new refrigerator

than it would take to run the old one for another ﬁ ve years.

10. Researching information about energy efﬁ ciency can save consumers as much

money as when they remember to turn off lights and air conditioners.

Parallelism with Certain Paired Words

When a sentence uses certain paired words called correlative conjunc-

tions, the items joined by these paired words must be parallel. Correla-

tive conjunctions, shown below, link two equal elements and show the

relationship between them.

both . . . and neither . . . nor rather . . . than

either . . . or not only . . . but also

NOT PARALLEL Brianna dislikes both fruit and eating vegetables.

PARALLEL Brianna dislikes both fruit and vegetables.

NOT PARALLEL She would rather eat popcorn every night than to cook.

PARALLEL She would rather eat popcorn every night than cook.

PRACTICE 3 MAKING SENTENCES WITH PAIRED WORDS

PARALLEL

In each sentence, circle the paired words and underline the parts of the sen-

tence that should be parallel. Then, edit the sentence to make it parallel. You

may need to change the second part of the correlative conjunction.

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EDITING ESSAYS

558 Part Five • Other Grammar Concerns

EXAMPLE: A recent survey of young women reported that a majority

of them would rather lose twenty pounds permanently than to live

to be ninety.

1. People in the United States are both pressed for time and have gotten

used to convenient but fattening foods.

2. Many Americans are neither willing to exercise regularly nor do they have

to do anything physical during a normal day.

3. Being overweight can be unhealthy, but many Americans would rather

look thinner than to stay the same size and get in better shape.

4. In fact, some Americans are not only out of shape but are dangerously

obsessed with being thin.

5. The idea that thinner is better affects both overweight people and it even

inﬂ uences people of normal weight.

6. In their quest to lose weight, many Americans have tried either fad diets

or have taken prescription drugs.

7. Dozens of healthy, average-sized Americans in the past ten years have

died from either surgical procedures to remove fat or they have died from

dangerous diet drugs.

8. A thin person is neither guaranteed to be attractive nor is he or she neces-

sarily healthy.

9. Some people who are larger than average are not only in good health but

also can be physically ﬁ t.

10. Americans who would rather pay for risky drugs and surgery than eating

moderately and exercising may have hazardous priorities.

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EDITING ESSAYS

Chapter 31 • Parallelism 559

PRACTICE 4 COMPLETING SENTENCES WITH

PAIRED WORDS

The following items contain only the ﬁ rst part of a correlative conjunction.

Complete the correlative conjunction, and add more information to form a

whole sentence. Make sure that the structures on both sides of the correlative

conjunction are parallel.

EXAMPLE: I am both enthusiastic about your company

and eager to

work for you

1. I could bring to this job not only youthful enthusiasm

2. I am willing to work either in your Chicago ofﬁ ce

3. My current job neither encourages creativity .

4. I would rather work in a difﬁ cult job .

5. In college I learned a lot both from my classes .

Edit Paragraphs and Your Own Writing

Edit the following paragraphs for parallelism, referring to the chart on

page 562 as you need to.

EDITING REVIEW 1 (8 errors)

(1) Some employees who want to advance their careers would rather

transfer within their company than looking for a new job elsewhere.

(2) In-house job changes are possible, but employees should be sure that

they both meet the criteria of the job and to avoid making their pres-

ent boss angry. (3) Because businesses invest money in each person they

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EDITING ESSAYS

560 Part Five • Other Grammar Concerns

hire, many companies would rather hire from within and not bring an

outsider into a position. (4) By hiring an employee from another depart-

ment, a company neither needs to make an investment in a new employee

but may also prevent the current employee from leaving. (5) Transfers

usually go more smoothly now than in the past; however, an in-house job

move can still require diplomacy and being honest. (6) Experts caution

employees who are considering an in-house transfer to tell their current

manager the truth and that they should discuss their wish to transfer with

the potential new manager. (7) Employees should neither threaten to quit

if they do not get the new job nor is it a good idea to spread the word

around the department that they are anxious to leave their present job.

(8) Employees’ goals for in-house transfers should be career advancement

and making sure that they create no bad feelings with the move.

EDITING REVIEW 2 (10 errors)

(1) Black motorists frequently arouse police suspicion either when

driving in neighborhoods that are mainly white or when they are driv-

ing an expensive car. (2) A higher percentage of African Americans than

among people who are white are pulled over by the police. (3) Many

African Americans feel insulted, endangered, and react with anger when

they are stopped randomly. (4) African Americans are liable to be singled

out by police who suspect they are criminals not only while in a car but

African Americans also report being wrongly stopped on foot. (5) Racial

proﬁ ling is illegal yet a fairly common phenomenon. (6) According to a

2001 poll, among black women the ﬁ gure is 25 percent, and 52 percent of

black men have been stopped by police. (7) Victims of racial proﬁ ling have

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EDITING ESSAYS

Chapter 31 • Parallelism 561

done nothing wrong, yet they are made to feel that others are either afraid

or do not trust them. (8) Law-abiding African Americans should neither

expect such treatment nor should they put up with it from public ofﬁ cials

who are supposed to protect citizens. (9) Police departments around the

country must make their employees aware that automatically stopping,

asking them questions, and searching African Americans will not be toler-

ated. (10) Treating all citizens fairly is a more important American value

than that there is a high arrest rate for the police.

PRACTICE 5 EDITING YOUR OWN WRITING

FOR PARALLELISM

As a ﬁ nal practice, edit a piece of your own writing for parallelism. It can be

a paper you are working on for this course, a paper you’ve already ﬁ nished, a

paper for another course, a recent piece of writing from your work or everyday

life, or your idea journal entry. You may want to use the chart on page 562

as you edit.

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EDITING ESSAYS

562 Part Five • Other Grammar Concerns

HOW TO EDIT FOR PARALLELISM

Pairs and lists

(see p. 554)

Comparisons

(see p. 555)

Certain paired words

(see p. 557)

Most comparisons

use than or as, so

check any sentences

with these words.

The paired words

are both . . . and,

either . . . or,

neither . . . nor,

not only . . . but also,

and rather . . . than.

Check any sentences

with these words.

When you use the

ﬁ rst part of one of

these pairs, be sure

to use the second

part as well.

Parallelism is the use of similar grammatical

structures for similar ideas. Edit for parallelism by

checking three common sentence structures.

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563

Sentence Variety

Putting Rhythm in Your Writing

Understand What Sentence Variety Is

Having sentence variety in your writing means using assorted sentence

patterns, lengths, and rhythms. Sometimes writers use too many short,

simple sentences, thinking that short is always easier to understand than

long. In fact, that is not true, as the following examples show.

WITH SHORT, SIMPLE SENTENCES

Age discrimination can exist even in unpaid jobs. The newspaper

today reported that a magazine has been accused of age discrimination.

The magazine is the Atlantic Monthly. A woman was told she was too

old to be an unpaid intern. The woman was forty-one. The position was

for a senior in college. The woman was a senior. She had raised three

children before going to college. She is suing the magazine. The next

day, another woman, age ﬁ fty-one, reported that the same thing had

happened to her a year earlier. She had ﬁ led a discrimination suit. The

suit was brought to court by the Council on Age Discrimination. The

magazine never showed up. The court never took any follow-up action

against the magazine. Apparently, the matter was not of great impor-

tance to either the magazine or the justice system.

WITH SENTENCE VARIETY

Age discrimination can exist even in unpaid jobs. The newspaper

today reported that a forty-one-year-old woman has accused a maga-

zine, the Atlantic Monthly, of age discrimination. This woman, who

■ IDEA JOURNAL

Write about

something that made

you angry.

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EDITING ESSAYS

564 Part Five • Other Grammar Concerns

raised three children before going to college and is now in her senior

year, was told she was too old to be an unpaid intern, even though the

position was for a college senior. She is suing the magazine. The next

day, another woman, age ﬁ fty-one, reported that the same thing had

happened to her a year earlier, and she, too, had ﬁ led an age discrimina-

tion suit. The suit was brought to court by the Council on Age Discrim-

ination, but the magazine didn’t appear for the court date, and the court

never took any follow-up action. Apparently, the matter was not of great

importance to either the magazine or the justice system.

Sentence variety is what gives your writing good rhythm and ﬂ ow.

Practice Creating Sentence Variety

To create sentence variety, write sentences of different types and lengths.

Because many writers tend to write short sentences that start with the

subject, this chapter will focus on techniques for starting with something

other than the subject and for writing a variety of longer sentences.

Remember that the goal is to use variety to achieve a good rhythm. Do

not simply change all your sentences from one pattern to another, or you

still won’t have variety.

Start Some Sentences with Adverbs

Adverbs are words that describe verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs; they

often end with -ly. As long as the meaning is clear, you can place an

adverb at the beginning of a sentence or near the word it describes. An

adverb at the beginning is usually followed by a comma.

ADVERB AT BEGINNING Frequently, stories about haunted houses surface at

Halloween.

ADVERB NEAR A VERB Stories about haunted houses frequently surface at

Halloween.

ADVERB AT BEGINNING Often, these tales reveal the life stories of former

inhabitants.

ADVERB NEAR A VERB These tales often reveal the life stories of former

inhabitants.

■ For two additional

techniques used to

achieve sentence vari-

ety, coordination and

subordination, see

Chapter 30.

■ Answers to odd-

numbered practice

items are at the back

of the book.

■ For more about ad-

verbs, see Chapter 28.

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EDITING ESSAYS

Chapter 32 • Sentence Variety 565

PRACTICE 1 STARTING SENTENCES WITH AN ADVERB

Edit each sentence so that it begins with an adverb.

Frequently, hurricanes

EXAMPLE: Hurricanes frequently strike barrier islands.

1. Harsh weather takes a toll annually on sandy beaches.

2. That island house formerly stood on solid ground.

3. The ocean eventually washed the ground out from under it.

4. The house was ﬁ nally condemned as unsafe.

5. It is now going to be demolished.

PRACTICE 2 STARTING SENTENCES WITH AN ADVERB

This practice continues the story from the previous exercise. In each sentence,

ﬁ ll in the blank with an adverb that makes sense, adding a comma when nec-

essary. There may be several good choices for each item.

EXAMPLE:

Fortunately,

no one was living in the house at the time.

1. a row of houses stood on the east side of the channel.

2. a hurricane washed away most of the land nearby.

3. most of the houses vanished.

4. the house stood alone on a sandy peninsula.

5. maps of the island were redrawn.

PRACTICE 3 WRITING SENTENCES THAT START

WITH AN ADVERB

Write three more sentences that start with an adverb, using commas as neces-

sary. Choose from the following adverbs: amazingly, frequently, gently, lovingly,

luckily, often, quietly, sadly, stupidly.

EXAMPLE:

Luckily, I remembered to save my ﬁ le on a disk.

■ For more practice

with sentence variety,

visit Exercise Central at

bedfordstmartins

.com/realessays.

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EDITING ESSAYS

566 Part Five • Other Grammar Concerns

Join Ideas Using an -ing Verb Form

One way to combine sentences is to turn one of them into a phrase using

an -ing verb form (such as walking or racing). The -ing verb form indicates

that the two parts of the sentence are happening at the same time. The more

important idea (the one you want to emphasize) should be in the main

clause, not in the phrase you make by adding the -ing verb form.

TWO SENTENCES Jonah did well in the high jump. He came in

second.

JOINED WITH -ING Jonah did well in the high jump, coming in

VERB FORM second.

To combine sentences this way, add -ing to the verb in one of the sen-

tences and delete the subject. You now have a phrase that can be added to

the beginning or the end of the other sentence, depending on what makes

sense.

He also won the long jump.

He broke the record.

If you add the phrase to the end of a sentence, you will usually need

to put a comma before it unless the phrase is essential to the meaning of

the sentence, as in the following example.

The thief broke into the apartment.

The thief used a crowbar.

If you add a phrase starting with an -ing verb form to the beginning

of a sentence, put a comma after it. Be sure that the word being modiﬁ ed

follows immediately after the phrase. Otherwise, you will create a dangling

modiﬁ er.

TWO SENTENCES I dropped my bag. My groceries spilled.

DANGLING MODIFIER Dropping my bag, my groceries spilled.

EDITED Dropping my bag, I spilled my groceries.

, breaking

using

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