Thursday Tip: Paired conjunctions, and when not to use them

The last two Tips talked about using series and conjunctions to bring order to sentences and add flair. Today’s Tip shows how to inject some structure into pairs of roughly equal weight.

Paired conjunctions suggest parts of equal importance and require that those parts be of the same (or at least similar) construction. They often connote that it is somehow remarkable that the two parts are together. Common pairs: both … and; not only… but also; either… or; neither… nor; just as… so.

An example from an article on education in India in Thursday’s New York Times:

An educated person would be not only more likely to find a good job, parents here reasoned, but also less likely to be cheated in a bad one.

A note of caution: some writers fall in love with this construction, every pair becoming not only A, but also B. Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz is one who loves it. In his book Globalization and its Discontents, he uses not only on pages 4, 6, 8, 13, 16, 19, 20, 26, 29, 31, and so on.  Reserve these uses for occasions when the emphasis is merited. Otherwise, just use and.

The passage above, for example, occurs just a few lines after this one:

Not only has the roaring economy run into a shortage of skilled labor, but also the nation’s many new roads, phones and television sets have fueled new ambitions for economic advancement among its people.

A more serious problem than the rapid-fire paired conjunctions is that the second passage isn’t parallel. To be parallel, the second clause would have to begin but it has. An easy fix is to use and. Doing so is not only simpler, but also less likely to have problems with parallelism.

Another example of a paired conjunction, from Paul Burka’s “United We Fall,” also in Thursday’s Times:

Just as President Bush failed to unite Washington and instead ended up contributing to its divisiveness, so Mr. Obama will eventually have to accept that conflict, rather than unity, is the natural condition of politics.

Here, the paired conjunction helps the writer emphasize the similarities between Bush and Obama.

Note—where have all the so’s and also’s gone?

Only a few lines before the passage above, Burka writes:

Just as Mr. Bush’s message of compassionate conservatism appealed to many Democrats and independent-minded liberals, Mr. Obama’s politics of hope seems to disarm Republicans and rightward-leaning independents.

Why use so in the first instance and omit it in the second? It seems to come down to preference and the cadence in the writer’s ear.

Also widespread is using not only…but, omitting also. Here, however, there are distinct shades of meaning. Consider this passage from the Washington Post:

Along with the other films in this collection, it reminds us that Frankenheimer not only relished a great chase but made those chases so compelling that we were always willing to race right along with him.

According to Bernstein in The Careful Writer, we use not only… but also when one element is additional to the other. Here, not only means “partly,” or “not exclusively.” We use not only…but when one element completes the other, as in the passage on Frankenheimer or He is not only a painter but a very good one.