Correct spelling matters (at least to me)

Topics/tags: Rants, language, short

The other day, I received an email advertisement for MasterWriter, which claimed to be a set of powerful tools to help songwriters. Since at least two of my sons regularly compose music, I thought it was worth taking a look [1]. The site was a bit vague on the features [2], so I decided to watch the introductory video.

It turns out that it’s not so much a tool for songwriters as it is a tool for lyricists. That is, it helps you find near synonyms, rhymes, and such. It appears to do nothing significant with melody. But I watched more of the video anyway.

One of the next things I noticed was that they spell alliterations as alitterations. They also say, As far as we know, we have the only alliterations dictionary on the market. You think that if they cared that much about the feature, they’d spell it right. Or maybe there’s a subtle hint; by including litter in the spelling, they’ve told us something about the quality. You never know.

Given the focus on lyrics writing rather than song writing and their lack of attention to detail, it’s pretty clear that I don’t need to look any further. However, given that I’ve been reading Algorithms of Oppression, part of me does want to see what alternatives they provide for certain words. That’s an exercise for another day.

[1] Admittedly, one of my first questions was Does this run on Macs or Linux boxes, or is it yet another Windows-only product? I didn’t figure that out. There’s a small chance it’s Web-based.

[2] Never a good sign.

Version 1.0 of 2018-10-20.