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Comment by angdis | Hacker News Reader

Usually not a good idea to swear, especially when presenting to a wide audience. Not everyone is cool with profanity and you risk being silently judged and dismissed by those individuals as a result. Moreover, you never know where your presentation will be circulated. Not everyone understands or is fluent with extremely casual American speaking styles and idioms. Swearing just does not translate well.

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Zach dealt with this, specifically, in his blog post:

I don’t view it this way. I’m less concerned about my overall reach than I am with connecting with my audience. Put another way: I’m content with losing a handful of people if that means I connect much stronger with everyone else.

"I’m content with losing a handful of people if that means I connect much stronger with everyone else." - definitely the main takeaway from this. I'd rather have half my audience write me off for swearing than have the entire audience not care about what I had to say.

As you can see from the comments here, people's reactions to swearing are all over the map. Zach guesses that for his audience swearing will lose a handful and connect stronger with the rest. Even if that guess is right for his audience (which is not a given), it might be wrong for yours. I recommend seeking other ways to help the audience care about what you say.

The thing is, I agree with you - adding swear words isn't a panacea to make your talk instantly more engaging. Far from it! But neither do I think it's a lazy way out.

I'd be really surprised if any of my professional peers were offended if I were giving a talk and dropped in a swear word or two ... and I'd rather do so, and get a good reaction from a smaller percentage than water down my enthusiasm and reach nobody strongly.

A lot of the people reacting in the comments here are your professional peers. For some, it offends their religious or cultural sensibilities. For some, it offends their taste. Some associate swearing with linguistic laziness. Others associate it with uncontrolled anger. A few might associate it with an abrasive boss. For some swearing just means enthusiasm, but what I'm saying is you're going to get all sorts of different reactions, and it's hard to say exactly what array of reactions you're going to get.

That said, if for you the only options are swearing or watering down your enthusiasm, by all means swear.

Sure, but how do you know if you've connected much stronger with everyone else? I've never left a talk thinking "I really wish that guy swore more." And I personally swear all time. But I abstain from it during presentations because at best it's a cheap technique to get something of a rise from the audience, IME.

Not in presentations, but in support it can definitely help to swear. I found that if you swear to one 'notch' less than your clients, it helps put them at ease - they're no longer worrying that you might be looking down your nose at the way they're speaking. It means the clients are more likely to pass useful content along because they're not dividing their attention watching their p's and q's.

If it works for him, that's great for him and whomever he _thinks_ his audience is.

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