Gaining readership through profanity: an article about the F-Bomb without actually dropping it.
So one day you decided that you really wanted to be Leonard Alfred Schneider or as the rest of the world knew him Lenny Bruce. Sure many people have come close but just like the serial numbers on a hundred dollar bill, there can only be one Lenny Bruce. Others are similar but not the same. How is it that some can curse, swear and gain popularity while others do it and are labeled losers? It’s simple, the popular people follow rules and when done right they reap the benefits of “Hey look at this guy, did you see what he just said?”
Ok, so your decision to use profanity in your daily speech and or blog posts is something that one does not do half heartedly. This is something that would most often come about with the help of a case of malt liquor or other such judgement modifier but be cautious when deciding to follow through with such a decision. Profanity requires a commitment greater than that which you’d give to a spouse or child. Once you start, you must jump in fully and stick with it for the long haul. Otherwise, you’re just some hack trying to jump on the bandwagon. Also don’t go thinking you can just start dumping random profane words here and there, its not that easy. You’ll be seen as just nasty and worse yet uneducated. Remember too the ladies don’t like nasty, well some might, but that’s another story for another time. So through my over active imagination I can hear you asking, “Now just how do you go about this whole being popular while cursing and not scaring off readers.” Like a game of euchre, there are rules and some of those rules involve cheating. I’ll lay those rules out here and just like in our little card game, it’ll be up to you to tell the difference between the lies and the facts.
First off if you haven’t gotten it yet, one must commit wholly to the usage of profanity. Like fight club, this rule works best twice. Once you’ve decided that you want to be a cursing machine you’re not there yet, pick a category and or a word your going to use consistently. For instance, I like the F-Bomb because of it’s versatility. The other thing to keep in mind is that it’s best for our purposes to you yourself to not be the one actually doing the cursing. Again in my case, I have discovered that my technology possesses the trapped soul of a longshoreman. In my posts and tweets, they are the ones cursing but you can pick just about anything, your dog, cat, insinkerator or boss. Why do you avoid profanity yourself? Because your not nasty, thats why. Ok so you have your word(s) and your curser all picked out, now you can’t just go spewing filth willy nilly. Oh no, your readers will see that you’re just posting it for pure shock value. Even if your really are only doing this for shock value, you can’t make it look like that, unless of course you’re Quiten Tarintino then go ahead, shock away. For everybody else, subtlety is the plan. If you must, set yourself an upper limit to your profane posts. But if you keep exceeding this limit, you might be violating the rules. That or you’re just a filthy potty mouth. But be flexible in your limits and remember no real topic is off limits. But they must have a purpose, usually to entertain. If you can, in an amusing way, impart some kind of value to your readers. Then you got it and don’t need some hack on the internet telling you how to do it.
Tags: Opinions