Verb-ing vs. Parallel construction

Question

Is there a difference in meaning between this two sentences?

1- Sachin Tendulkar played an exceptionally outstanding innings, making the team win gloriously.

2- Sachin Tendulkar played an exceptionally outstanding inning and made the team win gloriously.

The first sentence has the VERB-ING modifier, and the second one uses PARALLEL CONSTRUCTION.

Is there a rule when to use one or the other?

Thank you!

AlpheccaStars · Accepted Answer

piermo1- Sachin Tendulkar played an exceptionally outstanding innings, making the team win gloriously.

There is a grammatical error.

Also "make win" is not a good collocation.

You can make someone lose. For example, you can cause someone to trip and fall in a footrace.

Or you can distract a person playing chess, causing them to lose concentration and make a bad move.

And "glorious" is a strange word choice.

"Decisively" would be a much better choice.

Sachin Tendulkar played exceptionally well, resulting in a decisive win for the team.

Here is a better example of the point of grammar. Both are grammatical. The first seems more fluid and natural.

Rebecca slipped on the loose stair, falling and breaking her leg.
Rebecca slipped on the loose stair and fell and broke her leg.

CalifJim · Answer

piermo
1- Sachin Tendulkar played an exceptionally outstanding innings, making the team win gloriously.
2- Sachin Tendulkar played an exceptionally outstanding inning and made the team win gloriously.

You need better sentences.

With the participle clause:

Sachin Tendulkar played an exceptionally outstanding inning, leading the team to victory.

With the compound predicate:

Sachin Tendulkar played an exceptionally outstanding inning and led the team to victory.

piermoIs there a rule when to use one or the other?

No. It's a matter of style, i.e., personal taste.

I find that the first one is better because the participle clause shows that the two actions (to play exceptionally; to lead the team to victory) are interconnected. The way the second sentence is written seems to say that one action happened first, and then the second action happened. Less interconnection is implied, as if we said "We went shopping and came home", which is pretty ho-hum as a sentence.

That said, participle clauses are found more often in written stories than in conversation, and the reverse is true of the compound predicates.

By the way, the use of a participle clause is not an example of faulty parallelism. Faulty parallelism, which should be fixed, is more like this example I found online:

Our company values are excellence, trust, transparency, and thinking out of the box.

Here the last thing in the list of "our company values" does not have the same grammatical structure as the other elements in the list, which are all nouns. The website where I read this suggests "innovation" should substitute for "thinking out of the box" in order to correct the problem.

CJ

Verb-ing vs. Parallel construction

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