Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Child vs. Son

Rereading the exercise, I was reminded of Lisa's comment about the use of child and son in the Kenzaburo Oe review. Here is the sentence in which the son appears: "As he plots the child's murder, he finally realizes that he must take responsibility for his son." Lisa is correct in pointing out that we don't in fact know that the son is the brain-damaged child. It would have been better if the author had written "brain-damaged son." As the copyeditor, you could certainly cross out child and replace it with son.

BTW, you may want to know that Oe received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1994. To read more about him, see Wikipedia.

No comments: