LPP 10

Parallel structure in sentences

You know, where all the clauses take the same form?

Every time I go to the gym and use one of the LifeFitness (or whatever) cardio machines, I read the same poorly constructed sentence: "Stop exercising immediately if you feel pain, faint, or short of breath." Now, this may not strike you immediately as an abomination, but it is---Stop if you feel [noun], [adjective], or [adjective clause]. Note that those are not all the same thing, as they would be in a good sentence, e.g. Stop exercising immdiately if you feel pain, faintness, or shortness of breath: Stop...feel [noun], [noun], or [noun clause]. Beautiful.

I guess I don't have to read that sentence over and over like an obsessive-compulsive maniac, but I do, and it offends me each time almost as much as the last. Awful. And no, I don't actually know that there's such a thing as a "noun clause" or an "adjective clause" nor what such a thing would actually be called were it to exist (and I can't imagine it wouldn't---if I learned anything from Latin it was that there is a name for almost any kind of grammatical structure you might use, and that I was supposed already to be familiar with all of them---riiiight).

Parallel structure, people. Use it. Makes you sound smarter.