In response to your [Charlotte Wile, Dec. 15] posting about effort symbols – I am a CMA and not a professional notator, but I did have an immediate response to your posting. I thought that attaching the plus or minus sign to the effort symbol could make sense and is potentially a good idea if there is indeed a problem with getting it confused with the symbol for hips. Perhaps the symbol could be attached only in that case, and not always – (it seems such a big deal to institute changes like that. How do you inform everyone?).

Mainly however, it seemed to me that the ‘moderately light’ symbol is just too fiddly. As these terms are all relative anyway, not precise, I would have thought that ‘moderately light’ and (plain) light are near enough to be the same and so the slanting line seems extraneous. Didn’t Marion North also differentiate degree by indicating very very light by two minuses and likewise with two plusses for very very strong, for example?