First things first: I LOVE questions. I pride myself on being a pretty good asker-of-questions. Former journalist, active listener, curious mind.

Asking great questions takes intelligence and empathy—traits I appreciate tremendously.

I think this is why I’m a little over-protective of questions. I don’t want them to be taken advantage of, diminished, or abused.

Like this…

Are you asking too many rhetorical questions in your writing?

So many that they start to reduce the impact of what you have to say?

Or they just make you sound a bit flaky?

I see this from time to time with my clients, and although I appreciate their eagerness to connect with their readers, I always try to get them to ease up on the old question machine.

Here are three things to look for to figure out if you’re asking too many Qs:

1. Most of the questions you ask aren’t actually questions.

They’re statements that end with a question mark. Eep!

Do a little question scan as part of your editing or revision process: before hitting publish or send, make sure all your questions are really questions. You can probably turn them into statements quite easily without losing the impact of what you have to say.

2. When you read your writing out loud, you notice an up-tick at the end of each sentence.

You sound a little over-eager; like you’re looking for love or approval. Pull back on the throttle.

The way your writing sounds when you read it out loud is also how it sounds in your reader’s mind. Too many questions interrupt the natural flow of prose.

3. If someone read your piece, they wouldn’t know which questions are seriously meant to be answered, and that’s because you aren’t sure either.

Congratulations: you’ve successfully stripped the question mark of all meaning! It can be a genuinely useful piece of punctuation, and you might want to keep it that way.

Not only question marks but also other pieces of punctuation including dashes, exclamation marks, and semi-colons tend to lose their impact if they’re overused. Save them for when you really mean it and they’ll have much more impact.

A note about starting with a question…

In journalism school, starting a story with a question was a big bad no-no. Although I didn’t fully understood why at the time, the rule stuck with me.

I think I get it now. When you start reading something—a book, a blog post, a newspaper article—you enter into an implied contract with the author. You are giving the author your time and attention, and in return you expect them to give you something of value. As such, you expect their voice to be at least somewhat authoritative. When the first thing out of their mouth (or fingertips) is a question, that contract is flipped inside out. Wait—you’re asking ME? It can be a little disorienting.

I think this is changing. Communication is becoming much more intimate, and I’ve seen and used questions as fun, effective hooks on sales and about pages, and elsewhere. But again, it’s worth asking if there’s a way to turn that question into a statement, and how that might change the experience of reading it.

You know what I mean?