In this talk I look at the role that macrostructures in discourse have to play in the study of swearing. While studied in isolation, such macrostructures have not yet been studied comprehensively and the range of macrostructures studied has been small. By contrast, work on microstructures is much better developed. In response to this, using spoken corpus data from the BNC2014, I take two approaches to studying discourse in this talk. In the first approach, I explore spoken data which has been annotated with a functional discourse coding scheme that shows, across the corpus, the distribution of a set of discourse units that generally characterise conversation. My goal is to see how swearing distributes according to discourse unit function and to account for any observations made. Following from that, I explore a single macrostructure of discourse - narrative, including its sub-elements - to see whether swearing interacts with this macrostructure and its component parts. I conclude by arguing that discourse is an important dimension along which the use of swearing may vary, that such variation is likely to relate to emotion, and that the different perspectives on macrostructure taken in the talk are complementary.