Question

What error in parallelism is made in the following sentence? Not only vacuuming, but the family wants to dust and straighten up the whole house. A. It changes subjects. B. It omits a relative clause. C. It uses inconsistency in a series. D. It uses imperfect coordinating structure.

Answer 1

The correct answer is letter D. uses imperfect coordinating structure.

From the sentence,
"Not only vacuuming, but the family wants to dust and straighten up the whole house."

This should be written as 
Not only vacuuming, but also the family wants dusting and straightening up the whole house.

Answer 2

The correct answer is D. it uses imperfect coordinating structure.

Parallelism refers to the use of the same word form throughout a particular sentence. So, in the example above, in order to achieve parallelism, we would need to change the word 'vacuuming' into 'to vacuum,' in order to keep the consistency with the other two verbs: 'to dust' and '(to) straighten up.'