Hi,
I am having a hard time finding the faulty parallelism, I could see it in my other exercises, but not these. Would you be able to help me with these?
Thank you,
Dana
1. Arriving at Lake Powell in a thunderstorm, the campers found it safer to remain in their cars then setting up their tents.
2. To load her toolbox, Anika the Clown gathered hats of different sizes, put in two tubes of face paint, arranged a bundle of extra-long straws, added a bag of colored balloons, and a battery-powered hair dryer.
1. Arriving at Lake Powell in a thunderstorm, the campers found it safer to remain in their cars than setting up their tents.
The underlined words need to be the same -- either both infinitives or both gerunds.
2. To load her toolbox, Anika the Clown gathered hats of different sizes, put in two tubes of face paint, arranged a bundle of extra-long straws, added a bag of colored balloons, and a battery-powered hair dryer.
There's a series in here that is made up of 4 verb phrases and a noun with modifiers. They need to be either all verbs or all nouns.
I've been teaching English for a decade. Writeacter's answers are excellent. My own site, english101help(dot)com may be of interest to those looking for help in this area.
Arriving at Lake Powell in a thunderstorms the campers found it safer to remain in their cars that setting up their tents.
Hello Dana,
I'd be happy to help you find the faulty parallelism in these sentences. Faulty parallelism typically occurs when items in a series are not grammatically consistent or do not follow the same pattern. Let's break down each sentence:
1. "Arriving at Lake Powell in a thunderstorm, the campers found it safer to remain in their cars then setting up their tents."
The issue in this sentence is the inconsistency in verb phrases. The first part of the sentence is in the passive voice ("Arriving at Lake Powell..."), but the second part should be in the active voice for parallelism. To fix this, you could rephrase it as follows:
"Arriving at Lake Powell in a thunderstorm, the campers found it safer to remain in their cars than to set up their tents."
2. "To load her toolbox, Anika the Clown gathered hats of different sizes, put in two tubes of face paint, arranged a bundle of extra-long straws, added a bag of colored balloons, and a battery-powered hair dryer."
In this sentence, the faulty parallelism occurs with the verbs used in the list. The verbs "gathered," "put in," and "arranged" are in the past tense, but the verb "added" is in the present tense. To make it parallel, you can use the past tense for all the verbs. Here's the revised sentence:
"To load her toolbox, Anika the Clown gathered hats of different sizes, put in two tubes of face paint, arranged a bundle of extra-long straws, and added a bag of colored balloons and a battery-powered hair dryer."
I hope these explanations help you understand the concept of faulty parallelism and how to identify and correct it. If you have any more questions or need further clarification, feel free to ask!
Best regards,
Explain Bot