"Suri is a very special little girl. She's just beautiful, very alert, and she's got a great head of hair." - Jenna Elfman, in People, about Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise's daughter
Jenna has made a common error in parallelism. She has listed three of Suri's qualities, but the items do not conform to a single structure. Similar parts of a sentence should be structured in the same way.
This is Jenna's list:
- just beautiful [This is an adjective phrase; the adverb "just" modifies the adjective "beautiful."]
- very alert [This is an adjective phrase; the adverb "very" modifies the adjective "alert."]
- she's got a great head of hair [This is an independent clause.]
Two items in the list are adjective phrase, and the third item is an independent clause. This sentence is not parallel in structure.
This version of Jenna's statement corrects the error in parallelism by combining the two adjective phrases to form a compound predicate adjective.
"She's just beautiful and very alert, and she's got a great head of hair."
This sentence features two independent clauses joined by a comma and the conjunction "and." It is grammatically correct.
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