According to scholars, the earliest writing was probably not a direct

Let's start by putting (A) and (B) side-by-side:


The verb tense in (A) is really confusing, and it's definitely not our best option. We have three different verbs in the sentence, all of which describe "the earliest writing", which:

• ..."was probably not a direct rendering of speech"
• "...was more likely to begin..."
• and "...later merged with spoken language."

That middle piece is wacky. All three of these things happened in the past, and need to be in the same version of past tense. So the underlined portion is odd: why would we say "was more likely to begin", when we could just say "more likely began as"? "Begin" is in present tense (i.e., a general characteristic), and "was more likely to begin" doesn't make much sense -- it's almost as if the earliest writing had some probabilistic quality or something, and there was a good chance that it would eventually begin "as a separate and distinct symbolic system."

That's so much messier than (B), which just says that according to scholars, it's likely that the earliest writing actually began "as a separate and distinct symbolic system."

So we can get rid of (A), and keep (B).


There are two little problems with (C), particularly when we compare it with (B).

First, I don't know why we would switch the verb "began" to the participle "beginning", considering that the rest of the sentence features nice, simple, past tense verbs ("the earliest writing was... and later merged..." So in this sense, (B) is clearly better than (C).

The other issue is that it doesn't really make sense to say that the earliest writing was beginning "from a separate and distinct symbolic system." The earliest writing didn't evolve from some other separate and distinct system; the earliest writing WAS the separate and distinct symbolic system.

So we can ditch (C).


We could make a lazy argument that (D) is wordy and awkward, and that's not necessarily wrong. (D) definitely sounds like crap, and I don't think that you could ever use the phrase "was begun" in a correct sentence. At least I can't think of one.

The more concrete argument is that that parallelism is wrong in (D). Again, we have three different verbs in the sentence, all of which are actions performed by "the earliest writing":

• ..."was probably not a direct rendering of speech"
• "...it was more than likely begun from..."
• and "...later merged with spoken language."

Notice that (D) breaks the parallelism by shoving an "it" into the list of verbs. We can say that "the earliest writing was probably not a direct rendering of speech", and we can also say that "the earliest writing... later merged with spoken language. But we can't say that "the earliest writing... it was more than likely begun..."

If it helps, check out (B) again, which features three nice, parallel verbs.

Plus, "from" doesn't make sense, for the same reasons as answer choice (C). See above for more on that issue.

Anyway, (D) is out.


(E) features the same parallelism issue as (D), and that's enough by itself to eliminate (E).

Plus, there's no preposition after "began", so that tweaks the meaning: "[the earliest writing systems] began a separate and distinct symbolic system..." Huh? The writing system didn't "begin" a new symbolic system; it WAS a separate symbolic system, so we'd need to say that it "began as" a separate system.

And for bonus points, I'm not sure that there's a good reason to include an extra "it" at the beginning of the underlined portion -- it's a non-referential pronoun (classic example: "it is raining" is an acceptable sentence, but the "it" has no referent), and that's not necessarily wrong, but there's no reason to use that extra pronoun at all in this particular sentence.

So (E) is out, and we're left with (B).