Help With English In Reviews

You know, just yesterday I was talking with my student (a very nice American guy who is really serious abour learning Italian), and telling him about the way standards of language competence for native Italians have been declining. I've seen some egregious grammar mistakes on newspaper, and not just on their websites - and what you can read on any discussion forum is enough to turn your hair grey. In many ways, mistakes made by native speakers are much worse than those made by non-native speakers of any given language.

I also agree that, in many cases, the problem with reviews is just bad writing. Not to toot my own horn, but, if you read any of my reviews, you will notice that I am a stickler for structure (having an introduction and a conclusion, and developing my argument in a way that makes it easy to follow), and I always use separate paragraphs. Many people don't do that, and the result is their reviews are not as easy to read as they could be with a bit more organization. 

Slartibartfast wrote: Epignosis wrote: Slartibartfast wrote: I actually like the idea as a voluntary one.  It would help the writer hone their his English skills. Ooooppppsss. I've always had this bad habit of using their as a gender neutral substitute for his or her.

Except that's okay. It didn't use to be, but at least in American English, using "their" as a gender neutral possessor is generally considered okay. "His" is often frowned upon, despite its status as "correct." At least "their" is better than "his/her." That one is just dumb.

Had to jump in, sorry.

I do a lot of personal research on this site about 70s prog and this topic is one which has really begun to bother me, too.  My beef, though, is not with the REVIEWS, but with the BIOS.

Bellringer wrote: I do a lot of personal research on this site about 70s prog and this topic is one which has really begun to bother me, too.  My beef, though, is not with the REVIEWS, but with the BIOS. I can understand that reviews are quite personal and that the site probably receives far too many a day to make copyediting them feasible, anyway, but the bio of a band/artist is supposed to be just that:  a simple history combined with a discography and a description of the band's/artist's sound.   I could let reviews stand as they are, but surely the bios should be held to a higher standard?

Feel free to PM any of the team collaborators with updated bios you may get the urge to write. There's a lot of issues in the backbone of this site that needs looking at - but with limited human resources and all of them unpaid, there are limits to what we can achieve in here, and keeping the momentum going forward with additions and handling suggestions is more than enough for most of the people involved here.

As far as language is concerned, which is what this thread was all about originally, I tend to see that many non-English regular contributors improve their language and linguistic skills as they keep writing (and reading).

We have a couple of Japanese members which might have a few opinions in that department ;-)

English writing help would be a nice feature, and a task for someone truly dedicated to just that. And I'm willing to bet good money that if that feature ever becomes available, the number of reviews submitted by non-English reviewers will increase substantially, and whoever's appointed as the language guide will get them first :-)

Bellringer wrote: I would love to do a little tweaking of the bios if allowed, so I'm wondering how I could do that without copying them out by hand one by one and re-submitting them.  They don't necessarily need re-writing, just cleaning up.

I hope my PM helped you. If you want to help, just send me PM with your version of biography and I'll replace it.