I know we’re allowed some of the tame curse words in our stories, and that we are allowed to use the stronger ones if we use asterisks and such, but the change is kind of annoying to me (yeah I know, it was a while ago).
Seriously though, these are 13 year olds, not 9 year olds… adding * to strong words will not make a difference except for making the word have less impact at times when it could actually, idk, suit the situation. Teen sees ‘f*ck’, they say the word in their head anyway.
I agree, when I am a person that curses a lot (accidentally) so I add it in my story and I forget about the rule, and when I do it’s annoying how I have to go back through and add the little *
I feel it’s dumb.
On the surface level, the rule doesn’t really bother me. I think it encourages authors to be intentional about their dialogue choices.
But I’m definitely annoyed that Episode seems to enforce this rule more strictly than some of the other, more harmful ones. It’s like you have to be extra careful with curse words but things like sexual assault slip through with little to no issue because the guidelines about what counts as “promoting” SA are so vague.
Yeah, I agree. Adding a * does not change anything other than not spelling out the word. But it still doesn’t change the meaning or impact or anything. Just don’t add the word if you’re gonna add a * or censor it in some way. Either add a warning and write the word completely, or just don’t include curse words at all. That’s what I think. I’m not including any curse words in my story, since I personally think censoring curse words is kind of useless in writing, while bleeping words when you speak kind of makes a difference in my opinion.
