The clothes looked more appealing inside the store than on the racks..

Question

The clothes looked more appealing inside the store than on the racks outside.

This is a parallelism question: inside the store vs outside the store on the racks

According to the answer, this is CORRECT as it is.

I was wondering why it is okay to leave "on the racks outside" as it is? I thought we would need to change it to "..inside the store than outside the store on the racks". Should we not try to make "inside" & "outside" directly parallel?

jwang516 · Answer

The sentence is fine the way it is. You are comparing 2 locations: inside and on the racks outside. The parallelism is regarding 2 locations. Furthermore, "on the racks" is modifies "outside" so you are comparing inside and outside.

"..inside the store than outside the store on the racks" is fine as well, but there's no such thing as "direct parallelism" that you speak of. You can omit some words in parallelism if there's no ambiguity. For instance you can say "The clothes look better inside the store than on the outside" instead of "clothes on the outside of the store" because it is clear what you are talking about.

However, if you say "The clothes look better inside the store than outside", now there is ambiguity. Are you talking about outside in general or the clothes outside? We do not know. Therefore, you must at least say "on the outside"

ccooley · Answer

It's correct because the two things that are parallel are both prepositional phrases: "inside the store" is a prepositional phrase, and so is "on the racks outside." Parallelism isn't about the specific words that you use - it's about what type of grammar those words are. As long as you've got two prepositional phrases, it doesn't matter whether they're 'inside x' and 'outside y', or 'inside x' and 'on y'. You just don't want to do something like this:

The clothes looked more appealing inside the store than hung them on the racks. (Incorrectly comparing a prepositional phrase to a verb+object)

The clothes looked more appealing inside the store than the racks. (Incorrectly comparing a prepositional phrase to a noun)

gvrk_77 · Answer

Please anyone explain why the below sentence is wrong.
“The clothes inside the store looked more appealing than on the racks outside”. Also please explain how the word “more” should be used?

hohaddict · Answer

I am doing this question for review and I took it as a Noun-verb parallelism problem.

Original Problem: The clothes inside the store looked more appealing than on the racks outside.
Breaking it down: The  clothes  inside the store  looked   more appealing   than  on the racks outside.
New sentence: The  clothes  inside the store  looked   more appealing than   they did  on the racks outside.

Using this approach, is this correct?

The clothes looked more appealing inside the store than on the racks..

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