Expletives in academic writing for coursework? I was just wondering if I should include an edited expletive in an essay I have to write for a Software Development class. I'm currently writing a paper about debugging techniques and I wanted to talk about reading documentation to ensure the correct use of libraries and algorithms. This is commonly referred to as RTFM or "Read The Fucking Manual". So I was wondering if I should change it to "Read The [expletive] Manual", replace a couple letters with *'s, or scrap the idea entirely. 

I just thought the teacher may enjoy a break from reading the same essay over 50 times that will include the exact same content (there are only so many debugging techniques). 

I'm also thinking about including the "It's not a bug, it's a feature" with the following image while expanding on the line of thinking.

The reason why I think I can get away with this is because the teacher frequently cracks jokes during his lecture, and he has actually used the bug vs feature joke in class before.
I was wondering if I should change it to "Read The [expletive] Manual", replace a couple letters with *'s, or scrap the idea entirely.


I'll opt for "scrap the idea entirely". You are misinterpreting what the purpose of class essays is - this isn't supposed to be a witty, innovative text that entertains the lecturer, and the lecturer will likely not mind so much reading about the same debugging techniques over and over again. The purpose of this text is to explain what you know about said debugging techniques. A secondary purpose is that you show that you know how to write an academic text. Some semi-witty text is likely to fail the second test, and spending a lot of paper space on an unrelated joke is likely to at least be a bad indicator for the first test (that is, if I get a paper where the author spends a lot of time writing about semi-related nonsense, my initial impression is that the author didn't really know what to write about the actual topic).


  The reason why I think I can get away with this is because the teacher frequently cracks jokes during his lecture


There's a place and a time to be humorous. Presentations and lectures can be a good time (because, if well done, jokes break the ice and keep the audience's attention), academic papers are notoriously a very bad time to crack jokes. That the lecturer cracks jokes in class does not necessarily mean that he wants to see them in your manuscript. I tend to crack the occasional bad joke in class, and as you may be able to tell, I am no fan of humour in student assignments.


  and he has actually used the bug vs feature joke in class before.


So he won't even laugh because he already knows the joke :) at least come up with something new.