Re: Does a rhetorical question need a '?'

[Dave Brown <david -dot- brown -at- tait -dot- co -dot- nz>]

Johan,

IMHO, it's a matter of style.

Personally, I like to have a question mark, even if it is rhetorical. 
But I can fully appreciate why others don't.

(I first came across this issue when teaching English. The text book was 
discussing greetings like "How are you[?]". Their argument was that it's 
a greeting not a question, and being rhetorical it didn't require a 
question mark.)

An alternative would be to reword the sentence to remove the 'why' 
(though it will lose its impact). For example:
"A hacker doesn't need to try to penetrate a firewall when he can steal 
the entire server"

--
Dave


Johan Hiemstra said the following on 13 Jun 05 9:04 a.m.: