Saturday, August 17, 2019

grammar - What's the rule for writing sentences with parallel clauses?



I've sometimes seen very nicely written sentences that have 2 clauses: the first is a full sentence, while the second, which is supposed to have a similar structure, was shorten into a special structure. Something like this:



"A1 use B1 to do C1, and A2 B2 C2."



For example:





  • "My brother goes to school by bus, and I by bicycle."

  • "I'm going to the supermarket to buy a can of milk, and you the hardware store a hammer."



I'm not sure if these are even grammatically correct or not, but just to show what I mean.



Does this kind of sentence structure have a name? What are the rules?




Please forgive my English as I'm a non-native Engineering-based speaker.



EDITED: I've managed to find one sentence: "The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, [...]". Here, "and the storms their energy" was very nicely written. I'd like to know more about how to write such a sentence.


Answer



The sentences in your examples are examples of Zeugma, and reading that Wikipedia article will be a good start toward learning to write your own. This may inspire you to study rhetoric in general, including other forms of ellipsis and parallelism. A full course on the subject is well beyond the scope of this site, but I hope these pointers are of use.


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