If you've ever picked up a romance novel expecting swooning confessions and instead got a murder mystery halfway through, you’ve experienced a genre convention being bent—or possibly shattered. Literary genres come with expectations. When you read a horror story, you anticipate chills and maybe some blood. When you grab a fantasy book, you expect magic, maybe a dragon or two, and an epic quest. These are genre conventions—those familiar elements that tell us, “Yep, you’re in a sci-fi novel now.”

But here’s the thing: while genre conventions help readers know what they’re getting into, they’re not set in stone. Some of the most memorable and exciting stories come from authors who know when (and how) to break the rules.

Parallelism, (parallel structure or parallel construction), is a grammatical concept that enhances clarity and rhythm in writing. At its core, parallelism means using the same pattern of words to show that two or more ideas have the same level of importance. This principle helps writers maintain consistency and balance in their sentences.

One of the biggest changes a writer can make during a self-edit is to fix parallelism mistakes. Unfortunately, grammar/spellcheckers don't always point out this type of issue, so you'll have to be on the lookout!