218k views
13 votes
Which sentence uses parallelism correctly?

01. The officers in the tent included the colonel, one major, and the lieutenant.
02. The officers in the tent included the colonel, a major, and one lieutenant.
03. The officers in the tent included a colonel, a major, and a lieutenant.
O 4. The officers in the tent included one colonel, one major, and a lieutenant.

User Panjo
by
5.9k points

1 Answer

7 votes

Answer:

The sentence that uses parallelism correctly is:

03. The officers in the tent included a colonel, a major, and a lieutenant.

Step-by-step explanation:

Parallelism consists of the repetition of a certain grammatical structure inside a sentence, and it is particularly useful when listing things. In the sentence we are analyzing here, the speaker is listing the people who could be found in the tent. For parallelism to happen here, those people must be mentioned in similar ways. For instance, if the speaker begins by "one colonel" and then shifts to "a lieutenant", the change from "one" to "a" breaks parallelism. It may happen, and it is not necessarily wrong, depending on what meaning the author wishes to convey. But the question here is to find parallelism and, in this case, it can be found in sentence 03, which uses the article "a" before each person:

03. The officers in the tent included a colonel, a major, and a lieutenant.

User Gordon Fontenot
by
6.7k points