Keep It Parallel: Parallel Structure Worksheet
- Grade band
- 9-10
- Duration
- 50 minutes
- Skill
- Parallel structure
- Standards
- L.9-10.1a — Use parallel structure.
- Materials
- Student worksheet (printable, included)
- Pencils
Learning objectives
- Students will be able to identify broken parallel structure in a list or comparison.
- Students will be able to revise a sentence to correct faulty parallelism.
- Students will be able to evaluate their own writing for parallel structure.
Lesson procedure
- Warm-up (5 minutes) — I Do. Write "She likes hiking, to swim, and bikes" on the board. Read it aloud slowly. Ask what feels off about the rhythm, then identify that each item is a different grammatical form.
- Spot the pattern (12 minutes) — We Do. As a class, examine 3-4 more examples (some broken, some correct), identifying the grammatical form each list item takes and whether they match.
- Fix the sentences (18 minutes) — You Do. Students complete Part 1 of the worksheet, revising a set of sentences with broken parallelism.
- Audit your own writing (10 minutes) — You Do. Students bring a paragraph they've written recently (or use one provided) and check it line by line for parallel structure, revising anything broken.
- Analyze real parallelism (7 minutes) — We Do. As a class, read the Part 3 excerpt aloud and discuss what deliberate parallel structure adds that a plain list wouldn't.
- Share-out (5 minutes) — Closure. A few students share one fix they made and explain what form they matched everything to.
Printable worksheet
Part 1: Fix the parallelism. Rewrite each sentence so all items match in form.
1. My hobbies are reading, to cook, and painting.
→ ________________________________________
2. The coach told us to run faster, jumping higher, and we should try harder.
→ ________________________________________
3. She is smart, athletic, and has kindness.
→ ________________________________________
4. Not only did he arrive late, but also he was forgetting his notes.
→ ________________________________________
Part 2: Audit your own writing. Find one list or comparison in a paragraph you've written recently. Copy it below, then revise it for parallel structure if needed.
Original: ________________________________________________
Revised (or "already parallel"): ________________________________________
Part 3: Analyze real parallelism. Read this excerpt from Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (1863).
"...that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
What three phrases are made parallel here? ________________________________________
What effect does the repeated pattern create that a plain list wouldn't? ________________________
________________________________________________________________
Background for the teacher
Parallel structure means items in a list or comparison share the same grammatical form: all gerunds ("hiking, swimming, and biking"), all infinitives ("to hike, to swim, and to bike"), or all matched clauses — not a mix. "She likes hiking, to swim, and bikes" breaks parallelism even though every individual word is spelled correctly, which is exactly why it's easy to write without noticing and genuinely worth teaching as its own skill.
Students at this level usually write competent individual sentences; parallelism errors tend to show up specifically in lists, comparisons using "than" or "as... as," and paired constructions ("not only... but also," "either... or"). Reading a sentence aloud is often the fastest way to catch a break — the rhythm noticeably stumbles where the pattern shifts.
Differentiation
Support: For Part 1, underline the mismatched item in each sentence before students revise, so the task is fixing a known problem rather than also locating it.
Extension: Challenge students to find a real sentence from a speech or published essay that uses parallel structure deliberately for rhetorical effect, and explain what the repetition accomplishes.
ELL support: Have students read each sentence aloud both broken and fixed — the rhythm difference is often easier to hear than to explain grammatically, especially for students still building English sentence-stress intuition.
IEP/504 support: For Part 1, underline the mismatched item in every sentence (per the Support note above) for all students, not just as an accommodation, and reduce Part 2 to auditing just two sentences instead of a full paragraph.
Answer key (for teachers)
Part 1 — Fix the parallelism. 1. "My hobbies are reading, cooking, and painting." 2. "The coach told us to run faster, jump higher, and try harder." 3. "She is smart, athletic, and kind." 4. "Not only did he arrive late, but he also forgot his notes."
Part 2 — Audit your own writing. Open-ended: check that the revised version puts every list item in the same grammatical form.
Part 3 — Analyze real parallelism. "Of the people," "by the people," "for the people" — three parallel prepositional phrases. The repetition builds rhythm and emphasis, making the idea feel inevitable and memorable rather than just stated once.
Digital extension (optional)
To keep an eye on sentence structure in a lower-stakes context, try a fill-in-the-blank story in Giggle Gaps, where each labeled blank has to fit its sentence's grammar exactly.