TAXI.com

First of all, I want to say that I respect what Taxi does in the big picture. The listings have been written pretty well, grammar-wise for quite a while, until this year. I have been noticing that in the past several months, the Taxi listings as well as the reminders about listings, are full of words that are capitalized as if they are proper nouns.

Why is this important? It's important because improper use of capitalization is not only annoying, it has become downright confusing. For months, I have tried to ignore the liberal use of capitalizing all kinds of words and phrases almost arbitrarily. But today I was confused.

I received a Taxi email for a listing. I started reading, "...if you'd like to get your music in Blockbuster Film Trailers...". Well, because "Blockbuster Film Trailers" was capitalized as if it were a proper noun, as in the name of a company, I'm thinking, "Oh, I didn't know Blockbuster had a film trailer company. That's interesting (especially since I thought they went out of business)".

While I'm wasting time pondering the topic, I finally realized that this is another example of Taxi descriptions full of random capitalizations. We are all exposed to plenty of slang, poor grammar, and use of shortcuts or abbreviations in text-messaging and on the Web. But these emails are coming from an internationally-known company, and I would expect them to be written by someone who at least has the emails proof-written, if the author is not aware of the rules of written English. It's important because without doing so, Taxi is confusing readers, as well as making the Taxi listings look like a middle-school student is writing the listings.


Here's how this email starts out:

"Dear Passengers,

Here are two KILLER listings you should check out if you'd like to get your music in Blockbuster Film Trailers or in a HUGE HIT TV Show! Please note that the Opportunity for Alt Country songs for the Hit TV shows ends TOMORROW! Read on...

HEART-POUNDING, PERCUSSION-BASED ORCHESTRAL INSTRUMENTAL CUES are needed by needed by an A-List Music Library with many placements in HUGE Feature Film Trailers! You WANT to be in this catalog! They're looking hard to find some fresh, new intensely dramatic, and epic Mid-to-Up-Tempo Instrumental Cues in the general stylistic ballpark of music heard during Blockbuster, action packed Trailers like..:"


Why are the words "Opportunity", "Feature Film Trailers", "Hit", & "Instrumental Cues" etc. capitalized?? They are just average everyday adjectives and nouns. They are not titles, or proper names. What has been an annoyance for some months has turned into confusion at times. Please have your emails edited, if that's what is needed. Thanks for listening.

Hi WhisperDream,

Welcome to the TAXI Forum. Good first post.

The reason we take liberties and capitalize whole words and treat others as proper nouns is to make important things pop to the readers' eyes. You'd be SHOCKED by how many people miss really important stuff in the listings! Things like, submitting material for an Exclusive Library that are already signed to another Exclusive Library. When the library hears the song and reaches out the member, only to find out that the song is already signed elsewhere, our credibility and that of the member goes way down because the member didn't read the listing carefully. That company may never run another listing with us because of that one pain in the butt moment.

Another reason is that the majority of the material submitted is not even close to the genre that has been requested. If we put the genre in caps, it's easier for members to scan the listings, see what applies to them, and hopefully increases their chances of submitting the right music.

There are many other reasons, but I'm now running late for a meeting, so need to go. I may elaborate later.

Best,
Michael

I'm also noticing that the Capitalization neglects to capitalize words like a, and, the, for... kinda like song titles eh.

Thank you for your response, especially when you are very busy. I agree that it is a great idea to help to point out important aspects of a listing that members might otherwise miss. I feel that if you put those particular words or phrases in all caps, it would help to make it obvious that it is intended to bring attention, as opposed to putting those words in mixed-case. Thanks again for your time.

wHo cArEs?

Casey

The web sort of has it's own grammar, very relaxed and almost anything goes, except for when people type in all caps, maybe the caps lock key was on by accident, and there is always someone whom admonishes the offender for "shouting". I suppose if people are listening to the type being read back by one of those reading softwares, it might amp up the volume on the all caps, but otherwise I never understood why it was so offensive.

It's like when you can almost always tell if someone is a teacher because they enunciate to make sure what they say is clearly understood, though most people outside the classroom might find that condescending. Thus, no one wants to be "lectured" to,lol!

How about this one?

or this

or this one

OMG

What a ridiculous topic for a Thread.

Hope I got me Kapitalz write!!!

Damned Capitalists!

I actually don't care about grammar, capitalization or spelling, as long as I know what you mean. Now, if I was sending out mass emails to members all over the world, I might care a little bit more. Human language came before the dictionary, so I guess the dictionary will have to get updated soon, to reflect human usage of language. And now, back to our regularly scheduled programme. And those of you who don't care at all, you won't get back the 2 minutes of your time that you spent on this thread.