Parallelism in SAT Writing Questions

You may be familiar with the concept of parallelism from your English class, but in case you’re not, here’s a quick overview. Parallelism is one of the most common concepts tested on the Writing section of the SAT, and one of the easiest errors to spot, once you know what to look for.

You’ll find parallelism errors in one of three places: lists, grammatical comparisons and factual comparisons. The rule of thumb in parallelism is: the items in a comparison or list must be of the same type, both grammatically and physically.

You’ll probably catch the mistake in this sentence: I enjoy biking, skiing, and to go on vacation. “To go” is in infinitive form, while the other activities are gerunds—they must all be gerunds, according to parallelism. I enjoy biking, skiing and vacationing would be correct. Or even I enjoy biking, skiing and going on vacation would be acceptable.

Your grammar ear is pretty adept at picking up these mistakes. However, the place where the SAT tends to stash its difficult parallelism errors is factual comparisons.

Unlike the other parallelism errors, faulty comparisons do not involve grammatical errors. Instead, a faulty comparison tries to contrast objects of different sorts. It is wrong to say: “My cat is faster than Amy.”

Instead one should say, “My cat is faster than Amy’s horse.” Or one could more tersely say “my cat is faster than Amy’s.” (The possessive grammatically implies the cat).

This type of error can be very difficult to pick up because your brain unconsciously makes the correction as you read. Because your mind reads for content and understanding, not grammar, you’ll have no problem understanding the meaning of the sentence, evens as the grammatical error passes you by.

QUICK TIP: Be on the lookout for comparisons. Your brain’s leniency toward bad grammar means that you need to read word for word, tracing your finger under the words if necessary.