Last week’s poll looked at swearing on blogs and asked readers whether they did it or not. 968 readers have voted so far.
Here’s how the results turned out:
Total Yes to No vote – 40% to 60%.
About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Wow!! That’s quite a bit higher than I thought it would be.
I think 90% of the 60% are lying. Either that, or I keep ending up in the wrong blog neighborhood.
Gol dang it, whaddya know! What the heck are people thinking! Frickle fracking bloggers swearing sometimes! :)
I think that “F@$# Yes” should have been a selectable option.
Nice numbers. I don’t remember cursing in my blogs, but then again, I think cursing is subjective.
I also think that cultural differences play a major part in the general view of cursing. While for me, a guy from South America, “Damn” may be normal, some folks in the US or UK may find that “offending language”.
I think the media has some effect on what is deemed to be “foul language”. 10 years ago the word “Ass” was bleebed out everywhere, but nowadays it seems to be normal.
whoa, so why blogger don’t want to swear on his blog…?
I made a decision, early on, that I would not swear on my blog. I think it’s because whenever I’ve gone out to comedy clubs, the worst comedians often relied on swearing for easy laughs. I didn’t want to do that.
I think swearing can be funny on blogs, as long as it’s done sparingly and in the right place. It also depends on your target audience too I guess.
!@#$ing right!
I personally don’t care for swearing on blogs, unless the message is so extraordinary that it requires a strong word for emphasis. In that case there are some words that are worse than others, and we all know what the worst or the worst are. As far as I’m concerned it is extremely rare that you could justify using those worst of the worst words in a post.
I didn’t know what to expect from this. I don’t think I thought it would be this high though. I personally haven’t seen that much swearing on blogs actually.
Personally I only swear when I submit an article on Digg :D
I wonder. As much as I don’t follow the rest of the world when it comes to being politically correct, business is business, and most businesses with integrity avoid using profanity in their posts.
Our capitalistic goal is to make money, and we can only do that by persuading one person to give it to another. If the playing field is level without swearing, and your chances of obtaining business can be spread across a wider variety of clients without it, then it would make sense, unless you have a specific niche (such as a harley fixit shop to be stereotypical) then you may not know who is reading your material and swearing may hurt you more than help.
Wow! All I can say is we have a pretty moral blog-o-sphere!!
I think it just depends on the nature and topic of the blog. A serious blog about marketing/business/productivity will tend to have less swearing than a personal blog about someones day to day activity where they are less formal.
Lots of potty mouths out there, for me it depends on the audience and the content. On a blog like this one, rampant swearing might look a little odd
Oh my god? Why should I swear on my blog? I love it :)
What I think most interesting isn’t the poll results, but people’s reactions to them. From “we have a pretty moral blog-o-sphere!!” to “Lots of potty mouths out there…”
I wonder which will predominate in the end?
Did Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com participate in this survey? How about Loren Feldman of 1938media.com? Just curious.
Wow, today is the first time I saw problogger disclose its feedburner subscription number it is well over 40K subscribers. I have been wondering how much this blog can make. With this number of feedburner subscription problogger can easily make $50 ~ 100K a month. It is truely a million dollar blog
I don’t swear often on my blog, but every once in a while a rant falls through the cracks. I’m sure this is the case with many people. The question really is whether you count words such as “damn” and “hell” when you vote. I’m sure there are a lot more people using these words than the stronger language than most find offensive.
Still, the numbers are about what I would expect to be honest.
If I read a blog that contains cursing, I stop reading and never go to it again.
Well, at least it proves that real humans are writing blogs and that we have some great deal of respect about blogging.
I agree with the Majority. I don’t curse on any of my baseball blogs.
I do cuss on my blog, but I have 3 kids, so it kind of comes with the territory ;)
Thats a shocking result. If your blogging for business or in any professional manner i think you should never swear on your blog. on the other hand if its a personal blog, about yourself, then i think if the swearing reflects your personality in the offline world, i don’t think its all that bad to do it in the online world either.
Each to their own i guess.
I think swearing can be used for effects. When there’s a “fricking”, you are building up the anticipation for the next word to be important and sort of unexpected. If that’s over-used, it would lose its own effect.
I used to write comedy sketches in college to be performed. My sketches tend to be really clean in terms of language, so if a character suddenly use a curse word, it’s ususally much more dramatic, unexpected, and the audience laughs more, as that point in plot is marked as being important and a huge twist. I think the same applies to blogging, which is a form of writing too.
I generally don’t swear on my blog. Why? I don’t find it necessary. Also, there are a lot of people who get easily turned off by swearing and won’t visit a blog again. But I’ve never heard of anyone not visiting a blog because of a lack of curse words.
I also want to maintain a “professional” image on my blog and I doubt swearing would help me do that. That’s just my opinion though.
Interesting poll!
Who f$&%$*king cares???
Personally I don’t swear because I don’t think I can pull it off. Plus I think my mom (who is subscribed to my blog) would be appalled. I don’t swear in my day to day life much either.
The only blog I’ve read where I have not been turned off by swearing is Naomi’s IttyBiz blog. She is so cool and just makes me laugh. She times her swearing very well. :-) http://ittybiz.com/
Interesting, indeed. I think that 40% is right around where I would’ve guessed it would be. Some probably use swearing to create a bit of community and encourage the idea that the blog isn’t an official letter from a corporation or press release from an organization. And like “Brad’s Reader” above, I just feel a need to do it, myself.
Personally I find swearing offensive and un-necessary.
I feel that when the time is right, and the words make sense… Well, blogging is an alternative form of artistic expression, yes? At least for some of us.
I second quite a few of the other comment-ers here – used sparingly, I think cursing can work incredibly well for comedic effect, to stress a point you want to make, or make a story more vivid and interesting.
But I also think it matters what your blog audience and topic is; more pop culture-based blogs can get away with more frequent cursing than, say, a blog about personal development (like mine) or a topic more “weighty”, such as religion.
Interesting stats. Nice to see that though 40% do swear, 60% don’t. I choose not to swear for a few reasons.
1. I don’t swear on a daily basis.
2. You can offend people by swearing, but most likely will not offend someone by not swearing.
3. Swearing is completely unnecessary. If you’ve got a decent command of the English language, there are other words that can be used in place of an expletive.
It’s all in ones perspective isn’t it? Perhaps to regulate oneself too much would make one feel inauthentic. I think a bigger problem than cussing is people’s nutso fear of offending someone. We all can’t want to be that appropriate can we? I like to let my wild self shine when it feels like coming out. Why be little Stepford wife blogging clones when we can be our badass selves and have so much more fun? Don’t go running to my blog thinking you’ll read a bunch of foul language. I’m just reserving my right to do so in the future.
What’s the big deal? :-?
Whether swearing is done in the office, in public, at home or online in your blog, our service has been created to help everyone break that potty mouth habit.
Cheers!
Right on! So glad to hear this.
I got a little emotional on one of my posts and swore, but it was a deserved profanity since it was a product review.
Thanks for this post, it makes me feel normal, again,
Daniel McGonagle
http://marketersrelief.com
Swearing’ by itself is against etiquette and on a blog? No, never.
It happens; after all to err is human. Sometimes people cannot control their emotions and swear. In future, think before swearing. After all, it is not a healthy habit.
I prefer not to swear. I don’t really see the point in it. I don’t have a problem with it though, if you can’t find something else to say, swear.