Clause parallelism

[gmatwork]

For clauses that are parallel, do we need to repeat the "first word" (word with which each clause begins) in both parallel parts of the sentence?

Say -

Ram has a car, which is red in color and which is expensive.

Can we also say -

Ram has a car, which is red in color and is expensive -

Second "which" is not repeated...will this be an error.

In some cases of parallelism we can consider the helping verbs or prepositions to be part of the second parallel structure (if they are same across both the parts) but in some cases we consider non-repetition in the second parallel part an error.

Please explain.

[tim]

either of those is fine, as is "Ram has a car, which is red in color and expensive." it all depends on where you split the sentence into parallel tracks, and this is why you should NEVER start by looking at the left to figure out where the parallelism begins. look to the right of the parallel marker, figure out what kind of word you have (i.e. what part of speech), and then see if you can find a match on the left. use this approach and you'll see why all three examples are correct..

[Willy]

either of those is fine, as is "Ram has a car, which is red in color and expensive." it all depends on where you split the sentence into parallel tracks, and this is why you should NEVER start by looking at the left to figure out where the parallelism begins. look to the right of the parallel marker, figure out what kind of word you have (i.e. what part of speech), and then see if you can find a match on the left. use this approach and you'll see why all three examples are correct..

Nice explanation! You rock sir!

[tim]

my goal is to rock; glad to hear i succeeded! :)