One great way to get your message quoted by reporters is to state your ideas in the form of a rhetorical question. Why do reporters like rhetorical questions?
Because journalists like to break up the structure of their stories. If every sentence begins with a subject, is followed by a verb and ends with an object, the story can look boring very quickly. An occasional rhetorical question surrounded by quotation marks helps mix up the flow of a story.
“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
“Are we going to face a possible bankruptcy next year?”
“When is management going to listen to its own workers?”
“When will the airline unions realize that if they get all of their demands, there will be no airline left in business?”
“Why has the governor betrayed the faith of the voters?”
“Will Microsoft Office revolutionize the way workers get their jobs done?”
The one thing all of these questions have in common is that they aren’t real questions. They aren’t the expressions of one person seeking new information.
They are rhetorical questions, meaning they are simply a way of making a point in the form of asking a question. But they question doesn’t have to be answered in order for the point to still be understood.
Do I think it’s good to communicate your message points in the middle of an interview by using rhetorical questions? Yes I do.
