Parallel structures and IELTS

Posted by Pak Guru on October 16th, 2017 | 0 comments | complexity, grammar, IELTS, parallelism, writing

Modern art and music can cause conflicts in existing cultural values and can cause misinterpretation or even losing their originality in cultural identity.

If you want to pack a list of items into one sentence, then these items need to be parallel. What do I mean by items and what do I mean by parallel?

• Items are usually noun phrases or verb phrases, although they are sometimes preposition phrases.
• Parallel means that all of the items are the same type – all nouns, all verb phrases, etc.

Parallel nouns

Our opening example could be written using noun phrases only:

• Modern art and music can cause conflicts in existing cultural values, misinterpretation, or even loss of originality in cultural identity.

..in which we have one verb – cause – and three nouns separated by commas:

• conflicts in existing cultural values
• misinterpretation
• loss of originality in cultural identity

(Notice that the final noun is preceded by or even as a substitute for and.)

Parallel verbs

Alternatively the sentence could be written using verb phrases only, again separated by commas:

• Modern art and music can cause conflicts in existing cultural values, lead to  misinterpretation, or even result in loss of originality in cultural identity.

Parallelism and IELTS

Accurate parallel structures can help to increase your IELTS score for GRA (they’re ‘structural’), LR (noun phrases are probably the most common item), and CC (non-parallel structures are difficult to understand).
Ha! There – I just used a parallel structure built from nouns (GRA, LR, CC)!