Thursday, September 9, 2010

Lists: iPad is Unparallel



Karen writes:
"I loved your post about Apple's 'iPad is delicious' ad using non-parallel elements. That's one of my biggest pet peeves. Have you seen the latest ad? It's even worse!"

Let's look at the copy:
iPad is medical, live, musical, work, play, memories, social, magazines, historic

Egads, Karen, you're absolutely right! The list in this ad is a hodgepodge of nouns and adjectives.

Where does the iPad ad go wrong? Its list doesn't follow a parallel structure.

Quick rules: 

  • When listing items or thoughts, use the same part of speech throughout. So if the first item in your list is a gerund, the rest should be gerunds. Today I'm going hiking, swimming, kayaking, and biking.
  • Use parallel structure when writing headings, bullet points, and other types of categories. 

Correction: 

  • iPad is medical, live, musical, professional, playful, memorable, social, media-friendly, historic
  • iPad is medicine, TV, music, work, play, memories, social media, magazines, history

3 comments:

  1. YES! There's another one that has all adjectives except one: "learning." Of all the ideas to screw up on... Drives me flippin' crazy.

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  2. Lilysea: There's a link to the first iPad ad in this post. I thought that one was irritating, until I saw this new one :-)

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  3. Educators are like to read more article in here and i hope it should be helpful for them because they find all kind of solution on grammar from online.It helps them to know more about English.

    ReplyDelete