This isn’t an article on an genre of dance music, this is a guide on some things to do when writing your reviews, such as use of capital letters, exclamation marks and so on. In journalism and writing terms, this is called adhering to a ‘house style’ and it’s something you will need to get used to when writing for any publication in future.

Team Rockhaq will keep adding to this as we go along, so please keep referring to it.
When writing your music reviews and articles on Rockhaq, please bear the following things in mind:

Capital letters

Capital letters should always be used for:

  1. Song titles and album titles. For example, The Defamation Of Strickland Banks or It’s A Hard Days Night.
    If you do this, there is NO need to put song and album titles in commas. The reader will know what you mean.
    If you want to italicise the titles, feel free to. It looks good but it’s not a requirement on Rockhaq.
  2. At the start of sentences – obviously! But some of you miss this out sometimes. Tighten it up please.
  3. Never use capital letters when talking about genres. So hardcore, r’n’b, pop, nu-rave, prog rock, etc should all be written like this in lower case.
  4. Never fully capitalise any band names, song titles, even if that is how the band write their names. We will allow you to sometimes capitalise a word in your review if you want to put emphasis on it, but don’t do this too much please. It just looks like you’re shouting at everyone.
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Band names or song titles without spaces

If a band name or song title is all one word with no spaces, then it must be written like that.
However, try to capitalise every new word within that word so it’s more readable.

So, Andyouwillknowusbythetrailofdead becomes AndYouWillKnowUsByTheTrailOfDead

Or Youmeatsix becomes YouMeAtSix. Much easier to read.

Numbers

Always write numbers between 1 and 9 out as a word, not a digit.
So 2 becomes two.

All numbers including 10 and over are to be written in the digit format.
So 14 stays as 14.

Common mistakes

  1. A few of you tend to write about a song being ‘off’ or even worse ‘off of’. The correct word to use in this case is ‘from’. So the sentence becomes: “Takeover, from Jay Z’s album The Blueprint, is one of his best-selling tracks.”
  2. Please don’t overuse exclamation marks or bold lettering – if you do this too much, it looks like you’re shouting.