Essay Writing: Why You Should Avoid Harsh Language In Essays

When writing heavily opinionated articles and essays, it is often very tempting to use harsh language to make your point. After all, people tend to pay special attention when it comes to obscenities, followed by multiple exclamation points. While they are likely to be effective, they risk leaving your copy looking unprofessional, perhaps too unsuitable for mass consumption.

They say the best writers can make the same points and have the same impact without using harsh language. While that may be true, neither I nor you (for the most part) probably belong in that upper echelon (yet). Using strong and impactful (if somewhat offensive) language is simply too powerful a technique not to resort to when effect is needed.

If you want to use obscene words and statements in your copy, but would like to tone them down, there are several avenues available to you other than just saying it bluntly.

Quote other people who express exactly the same sentiments.. If you want to condemn the actions of a particular politician in a harsh way, you might try digging up a quote from someone who felt the same way. Whether it’s from a blog editorial or a reader’s letter to the editor, you can easily use the leeway they enjoy to express obscenities to your advantage.

Use profanity once in the text and never again. Using profanity once in a prominent way is usually acceptable, as long as it fits into the full context of the work. You can make sure its impact is felt by using it as the topic sentence or even just as its own paragraph.

Code it. A more common approach is to encode profanity, all while being liberally sprayed. By code, we mean statements like “Fy-“, “@#**!” and “a****le”. Your readers should understand what you say, without stating it outright. Of course, this will set a lot of flags in your grammar software, so don’t scream if you suddenly get a lot of error messages.