Parallelism Answer 14

14. Making an attempt to understand and knowing how to make a difference should be the goals of a good citizen or an influential malcontent.

Here the faulty parallelism is due to the linking of an infinitive phrase "To make an attempt to understand" and the gerund phrase "knowing how to make a differnce". Simply, one must change one or the other. In the above example, the infinitive phrase is changed to the gerund phrase. Below, the gerund phrase is changed to facilitate the infinitive phrase.


Here is the variant form:

14. To make an attempt to understand and to know how to make a difference should be the goals of a good citizen or an influential malcontent.

Note: Of the two, this is probably the more unwieldy solution.