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For example, The Winning Investor, Andrew Horowitz, has a podcast about how to read stock charts. While you're here, please check out the other Quick and Dirty Tips shows. It’s therefore best to avoid them in formal situations. In summary, rhetorical questions and tag questions are normal parts of everyday speech, but they are informal. It would sound weird to ask "It will not rain, will it?" It sounds much more normal with a contraction: "It won't rain, will it?" One clue that tag questions are best left to informal situations is that you often hear them used with contractions, which themselves are a bit informal. ‘It won’t rain’ becomes ‘It won’t rain, will it?’(4)" So, if we wanted to change Aaron’s rhetorical question “Isn’t it funny?” into a tag question, we would say, “It’s funny, isn’t it?” Both sentences mean “I think it’s funny.” "If the verb is already negative, you just make it positive. For example, ‘He is smart’ becomes ‘He is smart, isn’t he? (4)" Note how the word "isn't" is negating the verb "is" from the first part of the sentence: "He IS smart, ISN'T he?" As the Interesting Thing of the Day website wisely explains, “The simplest way to make a tag question in English is to repeat the verb, negate it, and then repeat the subject. The rhetorical question “Isn’t she leaving?” means about the same thing as “She is leaving, isn’t she?” Students who are learning English often find this kind of construction puzzling because the speaker uses a negative form to mean something positive.
“Tag questions, a peculiarity of English, are usually spoken rather than written,” states the website English Online (3). The second kind of question we’re talking about today is called a tag question. So, Aaron: no, it’s not advisable to use this kind of construction in formal situations. There are better ways to sound more qualified and more professional. You wouldn’t want to write, “Aren’t I the perfect person for this job?” in a job cover letter, nor would you want to say, “Isn’t it obvious that you should hire me?” in an interview. These kinds of rhetorical questions seem to be quite conversational. Wonder definitely thinks the girl is lovely, wonderful, and precious. Stevie Wonder, for example, wrote a famous song called “Isn’t She Lovely,” whose lyrics begin: Rhetorical questions have popped up in pop music.
If you make the “Isn’t she leaving?” question positive, it becomes just a regular question: “Is she leaving?” If you ask "Is she leaving?" you don’t know the answer whereas with the rhetorical question “Isn’t she leaving?” you are assuming she is leaving.
Rhetorical questions like this take a negative form. It’s called a rhetorical question, and it can end in either a question mark or an exclamation point, and in dialogue you can sometimes even have a speaker’s rhetorical question end in a period (1).Īnother example of a rhetorical question is “Isn’t she leaving?” That question means you think the woman is leaving, but you want to confirm. It seems counterintuitive, but that’s the way English works.
So “Wasn’t that movie great?” means that you think the movie was great. You start a sentence with a negative word when you mean something positive.
On a typical, IBM-compatible PC keyboard, the AltGr key, when present, takes the place of the right-hand Alt key.You’ve probably heard rhetorical questions more often than you realize. (source: )ĪltGr is a modifier key found on some computer keyboards and is primarily used to type characters that are unusual for the locale of the keyboard layout, such as currency symbols and accented letters. The dead key does not generate a (complete) character by itself but modifies the character generated by the key struck immediately after. To use the above combinations, you may need to enable the Greek keyboard layout for your Operating System first.Ī Dead key is a special kind of a modifier key on a computer keyboard that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter.