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Put what you hear
into words.

A hard-to-hear word. A second singer. A chorus that comes back around. Find your way through the little decisions that go into writing lyrics for Genius.

Start with the bit you’re stuck on

Where does the advice come from?

Each entry names its source and authority tier. A linked linter check may cover only part of a convention; read its example and the entry’s qualifications for the limits.

The ascending bars ahead of each entry's tier label are its standing drawn as a ladder: four steps for the four source tiers, filled up to the tier the entry's sources establish. Climbing it is evidence, never an edit: an entry rises only when a higher-tier source confirming it joins its citations.

LyricLint advisory
LyricLint's own preference, on a convention no Genius source states: the blank line between song parts, the text-hygiene checks. It shares the bottom step with community guidance, because our preference claims no more standing than unreviewed community writing.
Genius community guidance
Ordinary community voice in any venue: an unreviewed annotation, guide-page text with no staff badge, an ordinary forum post.
External reference
An authority outside Genius: a dictionary, a language academy, a platform's own documentation. It ranks below a reviewed annotation because it is authoritative about language, not about Genius.
Editor-reviewed Genius annotation
A reviewed Genius annotation with no staff among its contributors.
Genius staff guidance
Genius staff wrote or touched it: a staff-badged guide page, staff among an annotation's contributors, or a staff reply on the forum. Who wrote it decides the tier, never the venue it appears in.
What about spelling and grammar?

The workbench also uses Harper for English spelling, grammar, and style suggestions. Those suggestions come from the proofreader, so they are not listed here as Genius conventions. Read them in the context of the lyrics before applying a change.

58 results

A period at the end of a line

Warning punctuation.line-ending Previewed fix

Apple Music lyric guidance explicitly excludes commas and periods at line endings. The current Genius guide separately requires question marks for questions and uses exclamation marks for excitement, but does not state the same blanket ban. Removal is preview-only so quotations, abbreviations, and intentional delivery remain reviewable.

Convention: Questions always end with a question mark.

Example

Flagged by this rule
[Verse]
A lyric line.

In the workbench this reads: Lyric lines should not end with a period.

Accepted by this rule
[Verse]
A lyric line!

The fix

In the workbench this finding carries one control, labelled Remove the period. The change is contextual, so it is previewed as a diff in your document first and applies only when you confirm it.

The convention and its limits

This check detects the pattern shown above. An accepted example passes this check; it is not a review of the whole transcription.

Sources

The sources cited by this check:

Review guidelines for submitting lyrics (opens in a new tab) verified No periods or commas at the end of lyric lines
Question and exclamation marks (opens in a new tab) verified Punctuation for questions and exclamations
Check a transcription in the workbench
Spotted a mistake, or a convention we're missing? Send a suggestion(opens in a new tab)