Location Matters in Writing

“The vegetables rotted on the counter and began to stink.”

What do realtors say matters most? Location, location, location. This principle is as true in writing as it is in realty. The word order and placement determines not only whether you communicate clearly but also whether you present yourself credibly. 

This is especially true when using two-part expressions, such as either…or, not only…but also, and both…and. (The technical term for these two-part expressions is correlative pair.) If you put the words in the wrong place, your reader will be confused about your meaning, and you will have a parallelism problem. 

Let’s first learn about parallelism problems and then apply that knowledge to these 2-part expressions.