Lists come up in writing all the time when you want to keep together multiple items. They can be made up of words, phrases, or entire clauses. For the list to make the most sense and flow well, each item in the list needs to be parallel to the others. This means each item of the list must make sense independently with the list introduction. That’s confusing. Here’s an example.

Citing sources is essential to playing it fair in writing! Imagine spending a ton of time and effort to putting together a document of your own ideas based on your own research, and then someone comes along and pretends it’s their work. All they did was slap their name on your paper, and now they get all the credit! Unfair! That’s exactly what you’re doing to other people when you don’t cite your sources. Whether you’re directly quoting or paraphrasing someone else’s ideas, give credit where credit is due. Always. Another reason for citing sources, other than giving credit to others for their ideas, is to allow the readers to find those sources for more information. If you read a book with a lot of amazing quotes originating from a single book, you might be interested in reading that book. But you wouldn’t be able to do that if you didn’t know which book it came from.

Punctuation can get really tricky! This post talks about how to use parentheses properly.