Page 291 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

282 Appendix E

Someone who speaks like that, you might conclude, can’t quite get all his thoughts
together. Nothing seems to “flow.” When you say that a paragraph doesn’t flow,
you mean that it lacks coherence. Compare the preceding paragraph to this one:

I like swimming because it’s invigorating. I like fishing because it’s enjoyable. I
like hunting because it enlivens my senses.

This paragraph is coherent because it contains three related ideas, and each idea
is expressed in the same way: “I like X because. . . .”
In your proposals, I most often see problems with parallelism in lists. By
convention, a list is a group of related ideas, and, therefore, the ideas need to be
expressed similarly. Usually, a list is preceded by a string of words that end with
a colon. These words are called “determiners” because they determine how the
items in the list need to be phrased. If, for example, the determiner were “I like,”
then your list might go like this:

◉ swimming because it’s invigorating
◉ fishing because it’s enjoyable
◉ hunting because it enlivens my senses

If, on the other hand, the determiner were “I like to,” then you’d have to change
all the -ing words to verbs like “swim.”
Even writers who do a good job of using parallelism within a list sometimes
have trouble with lists within lists. The text below, taken from a slide in a presen-
tation, contains not one list but three, signaled by the appropriate numerals I’ve
added:

1. Costly administrative organization:
2. Three separate and fully equipped companies exist in a fairly small market
2. Considerable overlap occurs in administrative responsibilities

1. Logistics are costly:
3. Long chain of distribution from production to customer
3. The tonnage is small
3. Many small customers
3. Low rate of turnover in stock

To check for parallelism in text like the above, read each list separately to be cer-
tain that all items within each list are parallel. In that way, you can quickly and
clearly determine that the two items in the first list are out of sync. The first one