sharad  +  185722 Thu, 19 Jan 06 02:08 PM Communicating effectively and anticipating customer needs are crucial to high quality customer service. In above sentence all are in parallel form.. And i know that sentence is grammatically correct. As I understand, "communicating" is a gerund form..But "Communicating effectively" is also a gerund ? for some reason, i am getting confused by usages like this. I realise that sentence can be written using "effective communication and anticipation of customer needs", but  i just need to get comfortable with kind of usage mentioned above.. Would appreciate if one can explain me a bit. Thank you.. I Sharad. sharad Joined on Thu, Sep 23 2004 Junior Member 94 Verbs, Adverbs, Gerunds

	Mister Micawber  +  185734 Thu, 19 Jan 06 02:20 PM The word 'gerund' is going out of favour, with '-ing verb form' now preferred; the result, however, is the same:  a gerund is an -ing verb form used as a noun. In your initial sentence, communicating effectively and anticipating customer needs are nonfinite clauses acting as nouns (in this case, the sentence's compound subject):  this makes their heads, the -ing verb forms, gerunds-- so the gerunds are communicating and anticipating.  Communicating effectively and anticipating customer needs are gerundival clauses, or just '-ing clauses'. Mister Micawber Joined on Wed, Aug 4 2004 Yokohama Veteran Member 30,788 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master-- that's all.' Verbs, Clauses, Nouns, Adverbs, Gerunds, Compound Subjects

	sharad  +  185744 Thu, 19 Jan 06 02:31 PM thank you Mister Micawber.. Just another question on parallelism of gerunds.. Why isn't the following sentence considered parallel ? Thank you.. Effective communication, anticipation of customer needs and learning from mistakes are crucial to high quality service.. sharad Verbs, Adverbs, Gerunds

	Mister Micawber  +  185764 Thu, 19 Jan 06 02:56 PM They are loosely parallel (i.e. all nouns), but not strictly so.  The first two are nominal in both form and function (communication, anticipation), but the third (learning) is only a noun in function; it is an -ing verb form. Mister Micawber Verbs, Nouns, Adverbs, Gerunds