A Word, Please: Use a strategic ‘and’ to create parallel construction

Feel like putting your word smarts to the test? See if you can spot a problem in the following sentence: “Jones has been featured on ‘Today,’ ‘60 Minutes’ and in such publications as People and the Los Angeles Times.”

No, it has nothing to do with the punctuation. It’s the words. Want to try another?

“The program addresses the energy needs of a wide range of industries including healthcare, data centers, commercial real estate, warehouses, hotels, heavy and light industry.”

Both these sentences suffer from a breakdown in parallel structure. Clearly, this problem isn’t serious. You were able to understand both without difficulty. But in the editing world, precision matters, so faulty parallels are out.

Let’s look at parallel structure done right before we examine where it goes wrong. “Brad walked to the library, the post office and the park.”

This sentence attaches three different objects to a single stem. It really means “Brad walked to the library, Brad walked to the post office and Brad walked to the park. But to avoid all that repetition, the sentence cuts out the repeated subject and verb, forcing three objects to share the same stem.

Now look at this sentence: “Brad walked to the library, ate a mango and danced the Macarena.”

Here, three different actions share only one thing: a subject, Brad. But this is correct parallel structure too, because all three stems attach to that shared subject the same way.

What would happen if we mixed things up just a little in our first Brad sentence? “Brad walked to the library, the post office and drove to the park.”

In this sentence, the first two locations share a verb. That cues the reader that this is a list of places Brad walked to. Yet before we get to the last list item, another verb appears: drove. So the final thing in our list doesn’t attach to the stem the same way the previous two things did.

Logically, this sentence means: Brad walked to the library, Brad walked to the post office and Brad walked to drove to the park. It ends up with two verbs, “walked” and “drove,” because the parallel established earlier in the sentence has fallen apart.

How can we fix that faulty parallel? Throwing in an extra “and” before “the post office” can do the trick: “Brad walked to the library and the post office and drove to the park.” This works because the word “and” signals that you’ve reached the last item in the list. The pattern is broken. So whatever comes after the last item is no longer part of the list.

Now let’s look at our original problem sentence, “Jones has been featured on ‘Today,’ ‘60 Minutes’ and in such publications as People and the Los Angeles Times.” Do you see how, logically, we’re saying that Jones has been featured “on in” the publications? Our parallel began by listing things he was featured on, but then we broke form and inserted an “in.”

Again, the word “and” can fix things. “Jones has been featured on ‘Today’ and ’60 minutes’ and in such publications as People and the Los Angeles Times.” Or you can just insert a second “on” before “60 minutes.”

Now let’s go back to this sentence: “The program addresses the energy needs of a wide range of industries including healthcare, data centers, commercial real estate, warehouses, hotels, heavy and light industry.”

See the problem here? “Heavy and light industry” is meant as a single noun phrase, but because there’s no “and” before “heavy,” it seems that “heavy” is a distinct list item, fully independent of “light industry.” We’re saying that one of the industries in question is known only as “heavy.”

Once again, a strategically inserted “and,” this time before the word “heavy,” makes for an easy fix: “... healthcare, data centers, commercial real estate, warehouses, hotels and heavy and light industry.”

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.