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Showing posts from December 24, 2008

Workin' On It Wednesday #7 - Swearing

On this fine Christmas Eve, I thought I would keep things in the holiday spirit and talk about something totally relevant to the season--swearing.* Over on Mysterious Matters, Mysterious has a post about sex and swearing in the manuscripts he's been seeing. As I mentioned before , sex and swearing are hot button issues in YA because the readers of YA are under the supervision (at least theoretically) of adults. Some of those adults are strict, and some of them are my mother, and some of them are fine in theory with books that have a little bit of swearing in them, but get freaked out when the characters engage in sexual activities that are (statistically) typical for people the same age as the characters in question. Here's the problem: I was (am! totally am) a young adult. I have spent time with young adults. And many of the people I know are teachers of high school and junior high students. And in all those cases, the anecdotal evidence suggests that young adult are qui