English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Who's exactly refer to the act of "confessing a secret" here?
You are going to read one of a series of articles from The Times called Family Secrets, which are unsigned and use fictitious names, and in which readers of the newspaper confess a secret.
If I'm not wrong 'confess a secret' means 'admit a secret' or 'reveal a secret'.
So here, why the author wrote 'readers confess a secret' instead of writing 'A member of those families confess a secret'?
You are correct that confess a secret means "admit a secret" or "reveal a secret".
The reason that it says readers is that the specific people confessing secrets are readers of the newspaper, not just random members of the families.
It means that people who are readers of the newspaper will send in their confessions, to be published in the newspaper. The sentence is giving you the extra information that the pieces will not be written by journalists, or the newspaper's regular writers, but by people who read it.
By the way, it does not say that they will not be confessing to "a crime" , just to a "secret".
