To make your writing smoother when listing items, consider using parallel structure. This occurs when you follow the same grammatical pattern as providing a list of equal items or ideas within a sentence. For example, the following sentence uses parallel structure:

Los Angeles is my favorite city because of the weather, festivals, and beaches.

Weather, festivals and beaches are equal items, so they are presented as single words each separated by a comma.

The following sentence, however, lacks a parallel structure and so reads awkwardly:

Los Angeles is my favorite city because it is warm, multicultural, and the beaches and festivals are fun.

Though the warm, multicultural and fun beaches/festivals are equal items in a list, they are not presented as such. Notice that warm and multicultural are adjectives while fun beaches/festivals are nouns with an adjective (fun) describing them. The sentence might be rewritten as:

Los Angeles is my favorite city because it is warm, multicultural, and fun.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.