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stranger
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Hi,
Another one ... is this sentence Grammatically correct ....
Mary did her part of job by sweeping and by washing the clothes.
Is it allowed to use 'by' twice like in the above sentence?
Thanks in advance,
Kiran
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Well you have to use the preposition 'by' twice, or it will look like Mary is both sweeping and washing the clothes....the clothes being your only subject with two verbs.
What *I* would do, were this my sentence, is to write it differently:
Mary did her part of the job by doing the sweeping and the washing.
or:
Mary did her part of the job by sweeping the floor and washing the clothes.
Both of those modifications balance the verb and the subject clauses equally.
OR, I might even write it like this:
Mary contributed to the work load by sweeping the floors and washing the clothes.
However, I will defer, again, to the more knowledgeable posters here, regarding correct sentence structure, as it has been too many years since I have dissected a sentence!
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Carpal Tunnel
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Mary did her part of job by sweeping and by washing the clothes.
Mary did her part of job by sweeping and washing the clothes.
As far as parallelism goes either way works equally well. If you're concerned about people thinking that Mary was sweeping the clothes you might follow RubyRed's suggestion. Personally I don't think that any reasonable person is going to come up with a picture of Mary sweeping the clothes but you could recast it by reversing the order of the objects of the preposition: Mary did her part of [the] job by washing the clothes and sweeping.
The addition of the before job would be required to make the sentence good English, but that's a whole nother question.
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Also, though, couldn't you put: Mary did her part of the job by sweeping , and by washing the clothes? I think the comma serves as enough to separate the sweeping from the clothes; it does require using the second by, though.
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I agree with Ruby Red:"you have to use the preposition 'by' twice".
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... or you could just turn it around: "by washing the clothes and sweeping." post-edit: It has just been called to my attention that I am guilty of rendering Faldage chopped liver. My apologies 
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you could just turn it around
Exactly. Proper use of parallelism does not require you to repeat the by unless not doing so would create ambiguity. When sweeping clothes becomes something one might be expected to do *then "sweeping and washing clothes" might become ambiguous, but, *if you're worried that someone would get all tied in knots imagining poor Mary sweeping the clothes, simply reversing the order and saying "washing clothes and sweeping" should be sufficient.
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Summing it all up, using a "by" in each clause isn't wrong, but it's not required. Alternatives are available, if you think your meaning was unclear.
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stranger
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old hand
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just to thread-jack for an instant: It has just been called to my attention that I am guilty of rendering Faldage chopped liver.Ahhhh! FINALLY I UNDERSTAND! (what it means to render someone chopped liver/why it is people keep talking about chopped liver here) Ahhhhh. O frabjous day! Instant edit: I should have added a [slow-on-the-uptake e] there, too, perhaps. Mind you, I've always liked taking the scenic route. It's all about the journey, after all, isn't it? Now, back to my sweeping and washing....
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