Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
It's the gratuitous use of blue language that irritates me. To me, it reveals a lack of writing skills.
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If you judge the use of profanity in a particular bit of writing to be gratuitous have you not already decided that the writing lacks skill, and if that's right, doesn't what you are saying have a circularity about it? I don't like bad writing - and I'm not sure it is made any better or worse if it includes profanities. But generally I quite like swearing - it can be very effectively used or it can be ineffectively used, just like adjectives, displaced focalization, point of view and all the other tools at the disposal of a writer.