Emily Dickinson’s letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson were

[MaheshJ547]

Hi Ron,

I thoroughly enjoyed going through each and every explanation of yours on this thread. I specifically have one doubt on Option B – You were trying to compare “WERE-i) written and ii) ended as parallel (in below post); whereas, OG was trying to compare THAT i) begins and ii) ended as parallel

I also understand the fact that you eliminated B because begins is in present tense and ended is in past tense.

However, can you please provide your explanation behind parallelism issue compared to OG's explanation?

Thanks,
Mahesh

brief synopsis of problems with other choices:

(a) is explained above

(b)
this choice tries to put were written and ended in parallel.
this parallelism implies that the letters

"ended" or "were ended"

, neither of which makes sense.
the verb "outnumber" also makes this not a valid sentence, for the same reason why i can't write "he was born in 1858, left the country in 1874".

(c)
this is a sentence fragment; there's no main verb at all. remember that "-ing" constructions are NOT verbs by themselves.
also, there's bad parallelism between "beginning" and "that ends".

(d)
false parallelism between "beginning", "ending", and "outnumbering". the period of time didn't outnumber anything.
this is also a sentence fragment, with no main verb. the only actual verb in the whole thing is "were written", which is trapped in a subordinate clause.

[RonPurewal]

well, neither of those parallel structures works, so there's no issue.