ClearTips: Powerful paragraphs

Ask several questions and answer each immediately

A series of answered questions can give a paragraph a bantering, argumentative tone. And if you know your readers are going to have questions about the point you are making, try asking the questions yourself so that you can address each of them directly.

But which countries should represent these regions. India? Pakistan says no. Brazil? Argentina says no. Nigeria? Everybody says no. Solutions galore have been suggested: rotating members, tenured members, first-, second- and third-rank members, members without veto power, dropping the veto altogether or promising to use it in exceptional circumstances only.

You may say that the wretched of the earth should not be forced to serve as hewers of wood, drawers of water, and sewers of sneakers for the affluent. But what is the alternative? Should they be helped with foreign aid? Maybe—although the historical record of regions like southern Italy suggest that such aid has a tendency to promote perpetual dependence. Anyway, there isn't the slightest prospect of significant aid materializing. Should their own governments provide more social justice? Of course—but they won't, or at least, not because we tell them to. And as long as you have no realistic alternative to industrialization based on low wages, to oppose it means that you are willing to deny desperately poor people the best chance they have of progress for the sake of what amounts to an aesthetic standard—that is, the fact that you don't like the idea of workers being paid a pittance to supply rich Westerners with fashion items.

In the first paragraph, the writer uses questions to bring up and shoot down three possibilities, conveying the difficulties of reaching a consensus. In the second paragraph, the writer uses questions to open a conversation.

Back to Powerful paragraphs • Next