From the course: Writing with Proper Punctuation
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How to use questions marks with rhetorical questions
From the course: Writing with Proper Punctuation
How to use questions marks with rhetorical questions
- This may surprise you, but not every question requires a question mark. What? It's true. Rhetorical questions are weird, so they live somewhat outside the normal rules. In general, when you ask a rhetorical question, you don't expect an answer. "Why don't you leave me alone," for example, isn't a question as much as a command or a plea. Only a smart alec would reply with something like, "Well, I don't leave you alone because it's fun to annoy you." If someone asks you a question you think is obvious, like, "Do you want pizza for dinner?" You might sarcastically respond "is rain wet," and again, you don't really expect an answer. And here's one last slightly different example, "who knows." That's an idiom that's technically a question, but has the meaning of a statement, more like, "I don't think anyone knows." Since rhetorical questions like these act more like statements, it's actually up to you whether to use a…
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