How to Style Profanity

From pinterest.com/mastriannimel/profanity/

 

Some time ago, I wrote about the suitability of profanity in prose. My conclusion was that, depending on the context, it’s up to the producer to decide whether to publish profanity and the reader whether to accept or reject it. But if you, the producer, decide to allow profanity, know that there are degrees of deployment.

The simplest approach, of course, is to treat profane and obscene words and phrases just like any other. As I mentioned earlier, many people (myself included) find humor in judiciously employed cussing intended to evoke amusement, and nothing beats a string of expletives to convey passion of one kind or another.

Understandably, however, this acceptance is not universal, and publishers must be sensitive to their readership. General-interest magazines and websites and the like, especially those with paid subscriptions and/or with a reputation to establish or uphold, are unlikely to allow such terms to parade across the page or the screen like rowdy revelers.

Publications with niche audiences consisting of people who unabashedly use profanity in speech and writing, and hear it without flinching, are going to have a more relaxed attitude about provocative language. But what if yours doesn’t belong in that category? You, and your writers, can refrain from including profanity in your narrative, but what about reporting what another party wrote or said when the statement includes naughty words?

In lighthearted contexts, writers and editors can bowdlerize comments with euphemistically droll descriptions along the lines of “Smith suggested that Jones engage in an anatomically impossible activity” or “She spoke, to say the least, in a manner inconsistent with what one would expect of a person standing among blue-haired ladies in the lobby of a church immediately after the service.” Coy references to utterances of “expletives” or “invective,” or to “colorful language,” also get the point across.

But if one would rather tiptoe closer to verisimilitude, one might print a word with a nonalphabetical character in place of one or more letters, as many people do to circumvent profanity filters in the commenting function on websites. (Sh!t, for example, provides an orthographical fig leaf and additional emphasis in one stroke.) Some publications have a more restrictive policy: Print the first letter only, followed by a dash (or two hyphens) or a couple of asterisks: s–, or s**. (The paired characters collectively represent, rather than correspond one to one to, the missing letters.)

One might also employ what has been variously labeled a grawlix (the term was coined, among other similarly jocular vocabulary, by comics cartoonist Mort Walker) and an obscenicon (the creation of Language Log blogger Benjamin Zimmer). However, an ostentatious representation like @#&*! — this approach is said to have been invented by Rudolph Dirks, the creator of the pioneering comic strip The Katzenjammer Kids — is best reserved solely for humorous use; alternatively, in a feature article or a column, a writer might simply refer to an f-bomb or the s-word rather than apply the news section’s substitution policy.

Another necessary component of a publication’s rules about the use of profanity and obscenity is a word list that explicitly draws the line: Which words (like mild oaths) are acceptable in print, and which (sexual and scatological terms, for example) are not?

Five Errors in Treating Quotations

When you quote another person, be sure to avoid these pitfalls of quotation format.

1. Sometimes, LaPierre said, “The only thing to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
In this sentence, the writer has inserted the word sometimes, though the speaker did not utter it verbatim, into the sentence because the speaker intimated it in other words. Because it wasn’t actually spoken, however, it is placed outside the quotation marks. But the sentiment begins with sometimes, not the, so the quotation becomes a partial one and the is not capitalized: “Sometimes, LaPierre said, ‘the only thing to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.’”

2. Alfred North Whitehead wrote that “The best education is to be found in gaining the utmost information from the simplest apparatus.”
A similar rule applies to an attribution (“so and so said/wrote/agreed”) that leads into the quotation without intervening punctuation; the quotation becomes part of a framing sentence, and the first word of the original quotation is not capitalized: “Alfred North Whitehead wrote that ‘the best education is to be found in gaining the utmost information from the simplest apparatus.’”

3. “We knew,” Jones says, “that the company would eventually become a major competitor, but, without a relationship, we thought we were in danger of not achieving ubiquity.”
In this sentence, the writer interjects the attribution into the midst of the quotation, which is standard procedure. However, the attribution should be delayed until a break between two clauses: “‘We knew that the company would eventually become a major competitor,’ Jones says, ‘but, without a relationship, we thought we were in danger of not achieving ubiquity.’”

4. “Schools may be the last place,” Smith said, “where the government is funding us to gather together into public forums to have conversations. We have got to protect that.”
This sentence, like the previous example, suffers from premature attribution. Because there is no natural break in the sentence, the attribution should be inserted between the two sentences: “‘Schools may be the last place where the government is funding us to gather together into public forums to have conversations,’ Smith said. ‘We have got to protect that.’”

5. “In many ways, it’s like the cowboys against the Indians. But the cowboys are fully backed by the state,” he said of the current situation.
In this case, the attribution is delayed too long. In a quotation of two or more sentences, as in the previous example, place it between the first and second sentences: “‘In many ways, it’s like the cowboys against the Indians,’ he said of the current situation. ‘But the cowboys are fully backed by the state.’” (Note, too, how this arrangement strengthens the sentence because it ends with a serious punchline rather than a dry attribution.)

10 Tips About Basic Writing Competency

Here are ten areas to be sure to attend to if you wish to be taken seriously as a professional writer.

Formatting

1. Do not enter two letter spaces between sentences. Use of two spaces is an obsolete convention based on typewriter technology and will mark you as out of touch. If editors or other potential employers or clients notice that you don’t know this simple fact, they may be skeptical about your writing skills before you’ve had a chance to impress them.

2. Take care that paragraphs are of varying reasonable lengths. Unusually short or long paragraphs are appropriate in moderation, but allowing a series of choppy paragraphs or laboriously long ones to remain in a final draft is unprofessional.

3. If you’re submitting a manuscript or other content for publication, do not format it with various fonts and other style features. Editors want to read good writing, not enjoy aesthetically pleasing (or not) manuscripts; efforts to prettify a file are a distraction.

Style

4. Do not, in résumés or in other text, get carried away with capitalization. You didn’t earn a Master’s Degree; you earned a master’s degree. You didn’t study Biology; you studied biology. You weren’t Project Manager; you were project manager. 

5. Become familiar with the rules for styling numbers, and apply them rationally.

6. Know the principles of punctuation, especially regarding consistency in insertion or omission of the serial comma, avoidance of the comma splice, and use of the semicolon. And if you write in American English and you routinely place a period after the closing quotation mark at the end of a sentence rather than before it, go back to square one and try again.

7. Hyphenation is complicated. In other breaking news, life isn’t fair. Don’t count on editors to cure your hyphenation hiccups for you; become your own expert consultant.

8. Avoid “scare quotes.” A term does not need to be called out by quotation marks around it unless you must clarify that the unusual usage is not intended to be read literally, or when they are employed for “comic” effect. (In this case, the implication is that the comic effect is patently unamusing.)

Usage

9. For all intensive purposes, know your idioms. (That should be “for all intents and purposes,” but you should also just omit such superfluous phrases.) On a related note, avoid clichés like the plague — except when you don’t. They’re useful, but generous use is the sign of a lazy writer.

Spelling

10. Don’t rely on spellchecking programs to do your spelling work for you, and always verify spelling (and wording) of proper nouns.