Parallel structure in communication

THE EDITOR: Parallel structure is important if we wish to express ourselves usefully, whether in writing or in speaking. We wish our meaning to be clear to our audience.

Thus, effective communication can hardly take place in expository writing if parallel structure is not maintained. We would not write in the same paragraph about pineapples, mangoes, silk fig and mowing the lawn. Mowing the lawn belongs in a paragraph with trimming the hedges and pruning the cocoa.

A reader or listener cannot follow the writer's meaning if, to offer another illustration, the washing of wares is given emphasis equal to that of financing the mortgage when the topic under discussion is home management.

Dishwashing (a daily task) is important to the well-being of the family as is the negotiating of a mortgage to ensure a wholesome environment, but to sloppily present these two activities as parallel would not make clear what the author means by home management.

Why then is it that when the Tobago House of Assembly's budget is written or spoken about (at least during the last two administrations) its four overarching components are recurrent expenditure, development programme, CEPEP and URP?

Neither a superficial glance nor a penetrating look at these four topics suggests that they are parallel in importance. But, are they?

In September remarks printed in a daily newspaper, Imbert said "$2.194 billion has been allocated for recurrent expenditure, $300 million for the THA's development programme, $18 million for URP and $9.2 million for CEPEP," echoed in the four main components of the THA budget as described by Chief Secretary Farley Augustine.

Spending on the first two budget categories is 100 times greater than that allocated to the second two, yet from Port of Spain to Scarborough this presentation of an island's budget is accepted as useful and valid. Certainly it does not exhibit parallel structure. Or does it?

Possibly the value of these budget categories is not calculated in dollars but in the contribution each makes to social stability. If that is the explanation for these seemingly unequal components of a budget being presented as if they are parallel, the value of make-work programmes is really disturbing.

A BLADE

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