Daily Devices: Faulty Parallelism.

Sometimes a sentence that is not technically incorrect but could still be improved by making coordinate elements more precisely parallel.  Sentences may not be wrong, but sound clumsy, and can be made tighter and more effective.

In literature, the term ‘parallelism’ is used to refer to the practice placing together similarly structure related phrases, words or clauses. Parallelism involves placing sentence items in a parallel grammatical format wherein nouns are listed together, specific verb forms are listed together and the like. When one fails to follow this parallel structure, it results in faulty parallelism. The failure to maintain a balance in grammatical forms is known as faulty parallelism wherein similar grammatical forms receive dissimilar or unequal weight. 

 Example:

FAULTY:
He liked to play basketball and riding horses.

CORRECT:
He liked playing basketball and riding horses.
He liked to play basketball and to ride horses.
He liked to play basketball and ride horses.