Compose Yourself by Harry Blamires

Author:Harry Blamires
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2003-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Commonest Failure of Parallelism

We have come to the commonest form of failure to preserve parallelism. The sentence here follows an account of how a horse fell at an event, snapping one tendon and badly injuring the other:

Fearing the worst, the horse was bandaged and brought back to

the vet’s box where Icyhoser had been set up.

The writer plainly means that this action was taken because those responsible for the horse ‘feared the worst’. But, as the sentence stands, it is the horse that is said to be ‘fearing the worst’. That is the consequence of saying ‘the horse was bandaged’ instead of ‘they [whoever it was] bandaged the horse’. The reader or writer who is content with inexactitude may demur, but in the long run the preservation of reason in utterance depends on exactitudes of this kind.

This business of attributing to human beings feelings and actions proper to animals and vice versa is more easily understandable than transferring human thoughts or feelings to inanimate objects. The opening of the following presupposes a statement about a person to follow.

Nonetheless, recognizing true quality, her bedroom walls are

covered in a floral fabric on an ecru-toned background by Manuel

Canovas.

The intelligent reader, taking in the words ‘recognizing true quality’, is left agog to hear more about this person of taste and judgement. It is a shock to be told that it is someone’s ‘bedroom walls’ that recognize true quality. And the way out of this absurd slip is so simple: ‘Nonetheless, recognizing true quality, she covered her bedroom walls in a floral fabric on an ecru-toned background by Manuel Canovas.’

In all these varied cases we are concerned with an illicit slide from one kind of subject implicit in the opening words of a sentence to a subject of a different kind whose connotation cannot adequately be a substitute for the forgotten subject. Grammatical rules may be cited as rescuing writers from this most common of all errors. Yet the truth is that the mind of the writer, having seized on a subject and all agog to make a statement about it, promptly forgets and talks about something else.

Looking back to when we first came here, the custom was to visit

friends, but some of the actual visiting took place on the roads.

‘Looking back?’ And who, may we ask, is looking back? Why, the custom is ‘looking back’. When the writer began the sentence with ‘looking back’ the intention surely was to proceed to some such subject as ‘we’. The intention should not have been forgotten. ‘Looking back to when we first came here, we were accustomed to visit friends…’There is the same forgetfulness in this advertisement for a car park attendant:

Working alone, the duties involve collecting and accounting

for daily parking charges in accordance with administrative

procedures.

And who is ‘working alone’? we ask this time. And plainly the answer is the duties are working alone. The writer has made that clear. If a different intention had been there, then the writer might have said: ‘Working alone, the attendant will be responsible for collecting and accounting for daily parking charges.

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