Which of these bullet points reads more smoothly?

• Teamed with a French software engineer in conducting monthly variance analyses and was providing information to Division Management in France.
• Conducted monthly variance analyses with a French software engineer and provided the information to Division Management in France.

If you said the second one, then you’ve experienced the value of parallelism. This grammar technique prevents awkwardness, promotes clarity and helps us to be more concise in our writing.

The trick is to create a flow by balancing verb tenses with verb tenses, nouns with nouns, participles with participles, and so on. When these parts are out of balance, our sentences tend to be choppy and hard to read.

The proper use of parallelism makes a good impression on résumés and PowerPoints, so go with the flow!

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