Problogger has an interesting post about swearing on blogs, so I’ve decided to take this opportunity to outline my thoughts on it.
I have read a few blogs with a lot of swearing and everytime I have it has felt like a gimmick; a Roy Chubby Brown or Andrew Dice Clay (Both with three names oddly enough) style wallow in obscenity that honestly added little, if anything, to the point of the converstation.
Certainly there are times where a bit of effing and jeffing is the most effective way to convey the anger that the blogger feels, and I think that those occasional outbursts are entirely reasonable, provided they are just really occasional. In those cases the swears are punctuation; they are the verbal equiavlent of just letting loose and breaking something and all the more powerful for being a once off.
The only time I find swearing offensive is if it is gratuitous. It is usually accompanied by personal attacks, or other failures of reasoning and I have, on all occasions, relagated those blogs to my do-not-read list. They do often seem popular though, especially those that choose public, or political figures as their targets.
I can’t recall a time when I have wanted to swear, or felt the need to express that much anger, in a blog post. I do know that I haven’t suffered the problems that some bloggers have, themes or logos being ripped off, plugins being hosted without their knowledge etc, that might drive someone to want to vent. I probably couldn’t say for sure until the situation arose but I don’t think I would resort to profanity even then.
At the very least I would let the post sit for a while before publishing and, probably, edit it later, in a calmer frame of mind.
I have been lucky that thus far comments on this blog have been clean, but I would take it as a duty to anyone that might visit this blog to clean up any coments that were unsuitably vivid.
I’m not sure you could call it reader appreciation as such, but I don’t see the need for a WordPress blog to feature unsavoury language, and I imagine it may come as a shock to some people to find it here, so I would switch it out before allowing the comment through.
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thanks!