Quote:
Originally Posted by JLeighs
I hate it. Maybe I'm old-fashioned
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Little, Brown turned down Norman Mailer's
The Naked and the Dead because it contained too much swearing. It eventually got published with [profane language edited by moderation] changed to 'fug'.
That was 1948 - so yeah, you're a bit old-fashioned.
It's hard to imagine how you'd write a novel about an Army unit in active combat
without using a lot of swear-words. They're a part of the language and play an important role in setting the tone of the scene.
I'm sure there are some writers who use gratuitous profanity as a crutch, but that's just bad writing, and there are lots of bad writers out there. Personally, I'm more offended by poor grammar and sentence construction, but I don't think books should have stickers saying 'PG-15: Author ends phrases with a preposition and uses run-on sentences'.