Have you written lyrics you can’t wait to share with the world? Great!
But, stop.
Before you share your beautiful words, make sure you have marked them with the correct punctuation; otherwise, your lyrics stand a big chance of being misunderstood, especially when singers and publishers see them in print.
I'm Janet Walker, a writer who lives in Atlanta, Georgia. I have published novels and written a few songs, and I am the author of a trucker’s guide that is a best-seller on Amazon.com.
Most importantly, I am a university-trained lover of grammar. Allow me to use my grammar skills to add punctuation to your lyrics!
...highly educated and brilliant. But I know, from years of working as an editor, that unless my client has a Ph.D. in grammar, he WILL make mistakes with punctuation. There are simply too many rules in English grammar (more than 3,000), many of them governing the proper placement of basic punctuation marks.
There is an egregious punctuation error in the letter salutation above. Did you spot it? If not, don't feel bad; it has become one of the most common errors in writing today. But that makes it no less wrong.
A basic rule of grammar states that if you greet a person or an entity, you use a comma to separate your greeting ("Hi") from the person or entity you are greeting ("Jack"). This is because your actual sentence is "Hi." The name "Jack" is the target or recipient of the sentence.
Hence, the above greeting should look like this: "Hi, Jack! How are you?"
To be grammatically correct, it only needed ONE mark: a comma.
Without the comma, you are actually NOT greeting someone named Jack but are announcing the takeover of an airplane by unauthorized individuals! ("This is a hijack!")
Lyricists are poets, yes, and sometimes they deliberately break rules of grammar to deliver a certain effect. THAT IS TOTALLY FINE.
But there is a difference between breaking rules for "artistic" purposes...and breaking them because you don't know them in the first place.
Some of us can tell the difference.
Without LyricSmart:
Well I was born a coal miners daughter
In a cabin on a hill in Butcher Holler
We were poor but we had love
That’s the one thing
That daddy made sure of
He shoveled coal to make
A poor man’s dollar
To see just how incorrect the above lack of punctuation is, look at how the words look when we stretch them into regular prose structure:
Well I was born a coal miners daughter In a cabin on a hill in Butcher Holler We were poor but we had love That’s the one thing That daddy made sure of He shoveled coal to make A poor man’s dollar
Obviously wrong! Right? So, with LyricSmart, you apply the punctuation below (which the songwriter probably did but that a particular website administrator did not). And, then, the lines above become the lyrics below:
Well, I was born a coal miner’s daughter
in a cabin on a hill in Butcher Holler.
We were poor, but we had love.
That’s the one thing
that daddy made sure of.
He shoveled coal to make
a poor man’s dollar.
Remember: A song tells a story just as much as a storybook tale tells a story. Both should be punctuated—except in cases when a writer knowingly and skillfully breaks the rules for literary or musical purposes. In those cases, I won’t touch your punctuation—or undo the lack of it.