rhetorical question

How to spot it

The shape is easy to see. Questions arrive back to back, nothing answers them, and the paragraph ends. A rhetorical question works by implying its own answer, so a run of them implies a whole argument without having to state one. That is why the run feels like reasoning while you are reading it and feels like very little afterwards.

Finding the run is not the test. The test is what sits after the last question mark. Read on. If an answer arrives, or a decision, or a claim the writer is willing to defend in the next paragraph, the questions were a setup and the argument is real. If what follows is a new subject, a heading, or a paragraph that begins somewhere else entirely, then the questions were the argument, and the argument was never made.

A second signal is direction. A run that is going somewhere narrows as it goes. Each question is tighter than the one before it, and the last one lands close enough to answer out loud. A reflexive run widens instead. The questions get vaguer toward the end, because a vague question is easier to produce than a precise one and costs nothing to leave open.

Why models overdo it

A question is the cheapest sentence in English. It commits the writer to nothing. It can be assembled almost entirely out of words already on the page, and it carries the cadence of thinking without any of the thinking. The next question in a run is cheaper again, because the one before it has set a shape, and a shape already in motion is the easiest thing to keep going.

The mechanism is that plain. A model choosing what comes next is weighing what usually follows, and after an unanswered question the likeliest next thing is another unanswered question. Nothing in that process is holding a promise open until it is paid. No part of it keeps a tally of what a reader has been led to expect and has not yet received. So the run continues until some other continuation becomes likelier, and then the page moves on to its next heading with the debt outstanding.

Which is why these runs read as busy rather than as wrong. Every question in them is a reasonable question. Asked one at a time, in a piece that answers them, most would earn their place. The accumulation gives it away, and so does the silence afterwards.

When it's fine

A run of questions earns its place when the writer pays. Shylock's questions in The Merchant of Venice ask for nothing. Each one has a single answer that everybody in the theatre already holds, and the speech spends the rest of its length collecting on what those answers concede. Frederick Douglass put a run of them to a Fourth of July audience in 1852 and then answered every one himself, at length, in his own voice, across the rest of the address. The pressure the questions build gets spent on an argument that has earned it.

Barack Obama's pair at the Sandy Hook vigil works the same way from the other end. He says what he intends to do before he asks whether the country is prepared to call that carnage the price of its freedom. The questions are not standing in for a commitment. They are asking a room to meet one already made.

Your own run needs one plain sentence saying what it is pressing toward, placed somewhere on the page. Without that sentence, a single question serves the reader better.

Where it comes from

Classical rhetoricians named the figure pysma, from the Greek word for a question, and set it beside erotema, the single question asked for effect rather than for information. Cicero opened his first oration against Catiline with a run of them, demanding to know how long the senator meant to go on abusing the patience of Rome. The Book of Job answers a man's complaint with dozens of questions and no reply at all. Renaissance handbooks catalogued the figure carefully: Henry Peacham's Garden of Eloquence, printed in 1577, set pysma beside its cousins and gave the chain that ends in reproach a name of its own, epiplexis, so a schoolboy could tell the two apart. None of this is recent. Prepared speech has leaned on the run of questions for about as long as prepared speech has been written down, because a listener cannot turn back a page, and a question is the one sentence shape that makes an audience supply the missing half itself. The figure has not changed. Producing one has simply become almost free.