Which one of the following sentences uses colons incorrectly? A. Susan's desk contained: old love letters, a diary, and five dried-up ballpoint pens. B. Hedy found the secret to a lasting marriage: honesty. C. I have a great job for you: editing my new book. D. You'll never guess who was at the company picnic: Jerry Seinfeld!

A

Explanation:

There must be and independent clause before the colon is added.

faulty parallelism is a grammar construction where there is no balance in the parts of a sentence they have a similar meaning but the grammar structure is not equivalent.

the correct version of this faulty parallelism in the sentence is:

jefferson wrote the declaration of independence, and he was the nation's third president.

the problem with the first version is that the sentence:

"jefferson was both the writer of the declaration of independence"

presents jefferson as both a subject and an agent for the verb "write" because if he was "the writer" then the declaration of independence was written by him, besides that fact, the sentence presents a dependent clause.

while the second sentence:

he was the nation's third president.

presents a basic subject+verb+object structure

so, to give a proper balance to the structure, or better said, to give a parallel structure, we must write a basic s+v+o structure in both sentences:

jefferson wrote the declaration of independence, and he was the nation third president.