MET workshop: grammar pathway minisession

Parallelism to enhance flow at all levels of text

Facilitator: Mary Ellen Kerans

Parallel structures – pervasive in the architecture of texts of all types – help to ease a reader’s burden. They’re so familiar that we often hardly notice them in well-written prose, though they’re at work on many levels: in lists of concepts in tables and on slides, in sentences with data strings in scientific papers, at the start of paragraphs in argumentative essays or qualitative research papers, and within paragraphs composed of complex sentences with long predicates like this one. They’re also present in poetry and fiction, where they make music, group images, or harmonize complex thoughts. Parallelism may come naturally to us as writers in our native language but may be forgotten when we compose in our clients’ languages – as our clients may fail to use it when they draft papers for us to edit. As translators we may also fail to notice the need for parallel structures in phrases in our own drafts. This session will define the cohesive device of parallelism and show examples in real texts of many varieties. We will also apply parallelism to fix some hard-to-read text excerpts from translations or early drafts of unedited papers.

About the facilitator: Mary Ellen Kerans is a semi-retired freelance authors’ editor and translator who works mainly but not exclusively with clinical scientists. Her career has also included in-house and freelance work for publishers, plus many years of English language teaching in diverse settings.