Today in class, See Chai's group talked about using questions. One type of question mentioned was a rhetorical question. Rhetorical questions are questions that usually do not require an answer and the user can use that to drive a point, something that is very useful when it comes to arguments and persuasions.
However, depending on the person on the receiving end of a rhetorical question, responses might be very unexpected and sometimes hilarious. An example from a link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-sred9CCTk
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Haha! I agree with Jude's point of view. Sometimes, it is not easy to drive across a point using a rhetorical question.
ReplyDeleteJust to add on something to Jude's post. There was once I joined a public speaking competition in my secondary years. One of the tip my English teacher taught me was to use a rhetorical question to grab the author's attention. I guess this applies to any presentation too.
Just my two cents.
I bet you must be rolling your eyes when i made that rhetorical question example. Jokes aside, yes i guess you are right. Sometimes it might even have a negative impact because the answer at the receiving end is so different from the speaker. But even if its a rhetorical question you can still get information from non verbal cues right such as rolling eyes, folding arms and shaking heads. Like stephanie said it was a powerful tool to capture attention and that was indeed my intention. And from what i felt on my end, it was really effective.
ReplyDeleteSee Chai: Don't be mistaken. I agree very much with the usefulness of rhetorical questions and, in fact, I often employ them. However, I just wanted to show both a lighter side to it and how it might have gone wrong.
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