Why Are Listings Full of Improper Use of Capitalizations?

[michael11]

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.

Well it was one minute but thanks for caring!!!

[shanegrla]

Regarding your potential confusion with proper names (i.e., "Blockbuster Film Trailers"), you should know that Taxi doesn't print the actual names of companies in their listings anyway, so at least it should be easy to not mistake them for a specific company name.

Hope that helps a little bit.

[Casey H]

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Casey

[leadsynth]

So, I'm a copyeditor for a living. In fact, I'm the senior copyeditor for a major retailer of musical instruments and audio gear that most of you probably know. It's my "day job," but it's not just a day job -- I really care a lot about spelling, grammar, punctuation, and so on and so forth.

TAXI listings OFTEN have punctuation errors. They have inconsistent capitalization, too, as the original poster pointed out.

My own pet peeve is how often TAXI spells famous artists' names incorrectly ("Christina Perry," anyone? And it's Nicole Scherzinger, not Sherzinger. Jason Derulo, not DeRulo. And Jon Mayer and John Mayer are two very different artists. Come on, TAXI.)

But I can forgive all of that. I chalk it up to working quickly. And we usually know what the listings mean. It may not be good English to write "Submit well-structured songs that have super contemporary topline," but we all know that the "s" is missing, and we can mentally fill it in to grasp the meaning of the sentence. It's also not good English to say "Please submit one to three songs online or per CD, include lyrics." But we all know what it means.

You know what bothers me more than grammar, spelling and punctuation errors on TAXI listings? Grammar, spelling and punctuation errors on TAXI critiques.

[funsongs]

Ancient Grammar Police.jpg

Casey

Thank you, Casey... best one I've seen in a long time!...
thanks for the laughs... definitely gonna be passing that around.

[Casey H]

Sheeesh!

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Casey

[Russell Landwehr]

You know what bothers me more than grammar, spelling and punctuation errors on TAXI listings? Grammar, spelling and punctuation errors on TAXI critiques.

Really??? These screeners have a ton of submissions to plow through. They have better things to do than proofread their comments just to make the anal rententive members happy.

[Casey H]

You know what bothers me more than grammar, spelling and punctuation errors on TAXI listings? Grammar, spelling and punctuation errors on TAXI critiques.

Really??? These screeners have a ton of submissions to plow through. They have better things to do than proofread their comments just to make the anal rententive members happy.

But.... Does "anal retentive" have a hyphen?

I found the complaining about grammar and punctuation too ridiculous to take seriously.... Hence, the humor.

Casey

[Russell Landwehr]

I seem to recall a gentle chiding from you on my over-use of hyphens..


( I LOVE hyphens... and... elipsisies)

[TimWalter]

I recognize this thread is about a month old since the last post, but I haven't been on the forum for a while. One of my new years GOALS is to be on here every week....

I'd agree that critiques are the last place we should look for grammar/spelling/capitalization errors. I often think about the business model of things (as I have been entrepreneurial and interested in business workings most of my life) and I often imagine the world of a screener... you come to work, you get paid a good wage (I think Michael said in one of the taxi tv episodes screeners get $30 to $40/hour, which they are worth because of their experience/expertise) but you are probably expected to get through a certain number of songs per hour.. say there were 200 submissions, you might have only 6 hours or so to get through them all. That includes listening to the entire song (which could be 3-5 minutes), and then writing your critique, and then on to the next one. (I think it was Susan Koc or another screener who commented that Michael would "kill" them if they didn't listen to the entire song.. so even if it sucks, the screeners listen all the way thru, I believe.) So if it takes 3 minutes to listen to the song, and another 3 minutes to write your critique, that's 6 minutes/song, which is only 10 songs an hour (assuming no breaks! I'd be exhausted after a few hours). At $5/song, that's only a revenue stream of $50/hour from the submission fees, and seems hardly profitable if the screener is getting $30 to $40/hour.. there's lots of cost and overhead that would have to be paid. So, in summary, based on a back of the envelope calculation, if we are going to demand proofreading of critiques, the money would have to come from somewhere, and most likely it would require a higher submission fee. I myself would rather pay the current $5/song and perhaps have occasional errors (which I have not noticed tbh) than to pay, say $10/song, in order to get an error free critique. I do understand that those that make their living being a wordsmith might have trouble reading writings that have errors in them (just like an English teacher who can't help themselves from correcting their friends' grammar while out to dinner), but I have a huge difference in quality expectations between a quickly written critique and say, a manual for a $2000 amplifier I just purchased. The latter is a document that 1) is used multiple times and 2) once finalized, will not be changed for the duration of that model of amplifier, unless there are upgrades, etc, then often an addendum is added to the back, based on my experience. The two documents in use and expectations are as different as night and day. Just my thoughts.