Let’s talk about patterns. No, I don’t mean stripes or polka dots. I am talking about parallelism, which is the fancy way of referring to similar patterns in sentence and item structure in written lists.

If you’re writing a list using –ing verbs, you need to ensure all items listed end in -ing. This theory applies to full sentences as well as bullet points:

• Increasing sales by 70%
• Creating an organization-wide sales closing strategy
• Developing videos that received 100,000 views within a 24-hour period

All the items are also referring to achievements, which makes the items parallel.

In the above example, you might have noticed that the items are listed from shortest in length to longest in length, and that’s also a technique of parallelism. Here’s what can happen if you don’t list items using parallelism:

I love dogs that would rather go for a walk than sit on the couch and eat bon bons, alligators and brightly coloured clothes.

That doesn’t make much sense, does it? It sounds like the dog might eat alligators and brightly coloured clothes, and that’s not the intended meaning! What I wanted to convey was that I love alligators, brightly coloured clothes and dogs that like to walk.

Another factor to consider with parallelism is the use of prepositions (e.g., “to” and “be”) and articles (e.g., “a” and “the”) in a list of items. The correct way is to either list the preposition and article before each item or only in front of the first item listed (e.g., “Michael went to the park, to the grocery store and to the ice cream parlour” and “Michael went to the park, grocery store and ice cream parlor.” Whichever way you choose, be sure to be consistent throughout the piece you are writing.