Parallel Sentence Construction

[royl]

Source: http://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index ... pic=1867.0

Question:

Hi, Joe,

I'm having problem reconciling these two phrases: "to harvest knowledge" and "to being educated." If I understand correctly, "to harvest" is an infinitive, and "to being" is a gerund. Can you use them in one sentence? Is it being consistent?

Here is the original text:
Last but not least I wish to say that the purpose of university is to harvest knowledge and to being educated, so it is obvious that everyone can find a reason for attending university.


Answer:

You’re having a problem reconciling those phrases because the construction of that sentence is grammatically and semantically faulty:

“Last but not least I wish to say that the purpose of university is to harvest knowledge and to being educated, so it is obvious that everyone can find a reason for attending university.”

The first fault of that sentence is that it compounds two grammatical elements in different voices; this results in the sense of inconsistency you noted in that sentence. The first infinitive phrase, “to harvest knowledge,” is in the active voice with the noun phrase “the purpose of the university” as subject, while the second infinitive phrase, “to being educated,” is in the passive voice with the same noun phrase as subject. This second infinitive phrase is semantically faulty because it doesn’t make sense to say that “the purpose of the university” is “to being educated.” A university doesn’t seek to be educated; rather, it aims to educate. So the correct way to say this is “the purpose of the university is to educate,” with “educate” in the active voice and the noun “university” as the doer of the action.

The second fault of that sentence is its confusing unparallel construction, putting in a series two grammar elements of different structures. The parallelism rule provides that you can compound or add up two or more grammatical elements in a series only if they are of the same grammatical structure—whether all nouns, pronouns all in the same case, all gerund forms, all infinitive forms, all participial phrases, or all clauses in the same voice, etc. (Click this link to this forum posting, “Lesson #11 – Using Parallelism for Clarity and Cohesion,” for a comprehensive discussion of parallelism.) http://josecarilloforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=184.0

Taking all of the above considerations into account, that sentence you presented should therefore be grammatically corrected and its serial infinitive phrases made parallel, as follows:

“Last but not least I wish to say that the purpose of university is to harvest knowledge and to educate, so it is obvious that everyone can find a reason for attending university.”