I think it is acceptable. I often use question in my essays. And there are a lot of sample essays that use the question sentence. I know it is acceptable and safe to ask questions when writing essay. I personally like to start my essays with statements or questions that will interest my readers and it's never been a problem by my professor's.
It makes my essays more interesting The final question asks you to respond to a quotation. The first step is breaking down the quotation into its constituent parts- the different things it says.
This quotation, for example, is asking exactly the same thing as the other questions. The trick here is making sure you respond to all the different parts. You want to make sure you discuss the following:. Make sure your plan contains a sentence at the end of each point about how that point will answer the question.
A point from my plan for one of the topics above might look something like this:. To what extent are we supposed to believe in the three witches in Macbeth? My final sentence highlighted in red shows how the material discussed in the paragraph answers the question. Writing this out at the planning stage, in addition to clarifying your ideas, is a great test of whether a point is relevant: if you struggle to write the sentence, and make the connection to the question and larger argument, you might have gone off-topic.
This bit relies upon getting the beginnings and endings of paragraphs just right. This need not feel clumsy, awkward or repetitive. The opening sentence from the paragraph I planned above might go something like this:.
Contemporary suspicion that witches did exist, testified to by witch-hunts and exorcisms, is crucial to our understanding of the witches in Macbeth. To the early modern consciousness, witches were a distinctly real and dangerous possibility — and the witches in the play would have seemed all-the-more potent and terrifying as a result. Set aside a few hours, choose a couple of essay questions from past papers, and for each:.
You can get your teacher, or a friend, to look through your plans and give you feedback. It can seem depressing when your perfect question is just a minor tangent from the question you were actually asked, but trust me — high praise and good marks are all found in answering the question in front of you, not the one you would have liked to see.
You probably enjoy writing. You probably find rhetorical questions engaging, and you want to draw your marker in, engage them and wow them with your knowledge. Rhetorical questions are awesome … for blogs, diaries and creative writing. They engage the audience and ask them to predict answers. But, sorry, they suck for essays. Academic writing is not supposed to be creative writing. Rhetorical questions are designed to create a sense of suspense and flair.
They therefore belong as a rhetorical device within creative writing genres. Academic writing should never, ever leave the reader in suspense. Therefore, rhetorical questions have no place in academic writing. Academic writing should be in third person — and rhetorical questions are not quite third person. The rhetorical question appears as if you are talking directly to the reader. It is almost like writing in first person — an obvious fatal error in the academic writing genre.
Your marker will be reading your work looking for answers , not questions. They will be rushed, have many papers to mark, and a lot of work to do. They want answers. Therefore, academic writing needs to be straight to the point, never leave your reader unsure or uncertain, and always signposting key ideas in advance. Rhetorical questions are by definition passive : they ask of your reader to do the thinking, reflecting, and questioning for you. Imagine if the five points for this blog post were:.
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