Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Criminal Sentence 597: Need Another "And"

A subhead in today's paper:

"U.N. summit to focus on cancer, diabetes, heart and lung disease"

I understand there's a space issue here, but this list is not parallel. Here are the four diseases they're talking about:

cancer
diabetes
heart disease
lung disease

The third one in this list as written seems to be just "heart." If there had been more space, the subhead writer could have written "diabetes, heart disease and lung disease."
at

4 comments:

  1. DuncanSeptember 14, 2011 at 7:23 PM

    Or:


    "U.N. summit to focus on heart and lung disease, cancer, and diabetes."


    Seems neater than repeating the word "disease".. what do you think?

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Sentence SleuthSeptember 15, 2011 at 11:10 AM

    Duncan, love it!

    ReplyDelete
  3. WestleySeptember 16, 2011 at 8:28 AM

    Your title was "Need Another "And"", yet your solution added the word 'disease' rather than 'and'. I thought that you were heading towards "...cancer, diabetes, and heart and lung disease." Which adds an 'and' between the last two items (one of which is a compound item).

    Is that what you had in mind when you wrote the title??

    ReplyDelete
  4. The Sentence SleuthOctober 5, 2011 at 1:07 PM

    Correctamundo, Westley. (Is that a word?!)

    ReplyDelete

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