To Use or Not to Use Rhetorical Questions?

Such questions are everywhere, but not everyone loves them!

Adelina Vasile
6 min readMar 9, 2021
Photo by Josh Mills on Unsplash

Whether in copywriting or content writing, questions can help audiences interact with what they read.

After all, that’s why people read, to interact and resonate with words, not just for the sake of reading.

So, asking questions would typically allow you to engage with your readers, keep them on the page, lure them into reading your next sentence, and the next one, and so on.

But do all these apply to rhetorical questions as well?

Some people find them a sign of lazy writing and reject them because they’re not bringing real value, wasting the reader’s time.

Others, on the contrary, see them as a way of making texts more conversational and allowing the reader to identify himself with the topic, thus wanting to read more.

To use or not to use rhetorical questions, that’s the question!

Here’s why you might want to avoid rhetorical questions:

Lazy, patronizing, too commercial, and even with the potential of making the reader scroll away — these are just a few labels we can attach to rhetorical questions.

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Adelina Vasile

Mother, educator, journalist, copywriter. I write about the things I need to learn myself.