8.B Faulty Parallelism and How to Repair It

A sentence like 'She likes hiking, swimming, and to ride horses' feels off before you can name why. Your ear expects a pattern: hiking, swimming set up a -ing shape, then 'to ride' breaks it. The grammar still technically connects, but the rhythm snaps, because a list promises that each item will slot into the sentence the same way, and one item doesn't.

To find the broken item, isolate the words that come right before the list and read each item straight after them, one at a time. In 'We aimed to cut costs, raise morale, and the improvement of safety,' the shared stem is 'we aimed to.' Cut costs works, raise morale works, 'the improvement of safety' does not, since 'to the improvement' isn't idiomatic. The fix is to turn the broken item into a verb phrase matching the other two: 'and improve safety.' You test by rebuilding each item against the stem, not by eyeballing the commas.

Faulty parallelism isn't confined to comma lists. It shows up in comparisons using 'than' or 'as,' in paired ideas joined by 'not only... but also,' and in any construction where a sentence sets up a repeated job for more than one part to do. A sentence can have only two items and still break parallel structure, as in 'to hire counsellors and he wanted smaller classes.' The skill connects directly to schemes like anaphora and antithesis, which depend on deliberate, controlled repetition; faulty parallelism is what happens when that repetition goes unplanned and collapses under its own weight.