More thoughts on faulty parallel structure

Imagine you’re taking an editing test and you come across the following sentence. “Barbara says Jack also is enrolling in classes in libiral arts, algebra, economics and is considering joining the soccer team.”

What do you do?

You fix the spelling of “liberal,” obviously. Even if your eyes glossed over that, you catch it when you run spell-check. You pause at “says,” perhaps wondering if that informal yet popular way of conveying “said” is appropriate for the context.

You consider other places for the word “also,” perhaps putting it after the verb “is.” You question whether it’s a good idea to have the word “in” appear two times so close together. You decide to leave it as is.

Your first fix is right. As for the “says” and the “also,” you’re right if you change them and right if you leave them. In both cases, either choice is valid. You made a good call with the word “in.” It’s grammatical, even if it is a little awkward.

You take a second look at your sentence and decide you’re happy with your choices. See anything else?

According to someone who recently sent me a test with a similar question, most copy editors miss the other error. See it now? It’s in the last part of the sentence, “is enrolling in classes in libiral arts, algebra, economics and is considering joining the soccer team.”

In case you still don’t see it, here’s one final hint: It could be fixed by inserting the word “and” before “economics.” Here's my column explaining how that works.