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Teaching one student who is very good and another who is bad was a learning experience.

Teaching a student who is very good and the other who is bad was a learning experience.

One side of the coordinating conjunction uses "one student", the other side only uses "another." The parallelism of this usage depends on whether the term "student" carries over from first clause of "and" to the second clause that begins with "another" making it "another student."

does it need to be "another/other student?"

Cite the rule for why or why not.

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Joe Black
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  • It's not a question of if people will understand; people understand a lot of ungrammatical and unparallel structures. what is the that makes government implicit or not in the second clause? – Joe Black Dec 30 '14 at 07:16
  • It is also not a duplicate of the link suggested. This is specifically about the parallelism of "one student"/"another" and "a student"/"the other" and the combinations thereof. – Joe Black Dec 30 '14 at 07:22
  • The same principles apply. I can't close it by myself, don't worry. – anongoodnurse Dec 30 '14 at 07:23
  • Principles is not the issue as they are straightforward. The question in this instance is the application of those principles and the linked question, which should be deleted, does not address the parallel structure in this case if you read it. – Joe Black Dec 30 '14 at 07:35
  • The link should be deleted; it talks about parallelism of "less than, greater than, equal to", different from here. It doesn't answer it. – Joe Black Dec 30 '14 at 07:48
  • No one need agree with me. I can't close it by my self. If others don't feel it applies (it's a good explanation of parallelisms) they won't close it. – anongoodnurse Dec 30 '14 at 08:15
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    @JoeBlack: The rule is called Conjunction Reduction. It's a very common and ordinary rule of syntax. And it has nothing to do with "parallel construction" -- if anything, it destroys perfectly parallel constructions, because they're repetitive. – John Lawler Dec 30 '14 at 15:52
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    a...the... sounds wrong to me. It should either be a...another... or the..._the.... – Barmar Dec 30 '14 at 19:58
  • @Barmar: Mr Black did not ask for suggestions about his use of "the", "a", "another", or "the other.". He asked for a "rule" to "justify" including or omitting an additional instance of "student". Mr Lawler has answered that well. – Brian Hitchcock Jan 01 '15 at 23:53
  • @John Lawler: please promote your comment re Conjunction Reduction to an answer. It is clearly the "terminology" Mr. Black was seeking. I removed my answer, as it only answered his ostensible, but essentially rhetorical question "does it need" rather than his actual demand "cite the rule". – Brian Hitchcock Jan 02 '15 at 00:55
  • I was pointing to my previous answer. Here it is again: http://english.stackexchange.com/a/51955/15299 – John Lawler Jan 02 '15 at 01:03

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