Literary Devices: Rhetorical Question Stems

A collection of rhetorical question sentence starters to be used as a handout or poster. These sentence stems provide scaffolding to help pupils write rhetorical questions.

A rhetorical question is a question asked in order to create a dramatic effect or to make a point rather than to get an answer. It is a literary device often used to persuade the audience.

This vocabulary bank is particularly useful for planning and completing persuasive writing texts, such as adverts, debates, speeches and persuasive letters. Rhetorical questions can also be found in other text types such as instructions, diaries and stories.

This document contains examples of rhetorical question sentence stems. The rhetorical question stem list can be used to help to understand this literary device, to identify rhetorical questions within texts and to use rhetorical questions in writing.

Other rhetorical question resources:
Activities
✦ The Iron Man Literary Devices
Letter writing example text packs
✦ Letter to an Ogre
✦ Unicorn Letter
✦ A Dangerous Game Letter
✦ The Firework-Maker’s Daughter Letter
Instructions example text packs
✦ How to Catch an Ogre Instructions
✦ Unicorn Instructions
✦ Stig of the Dump Instructions
Adverts example text packs
✦ Stig of the Dump Advert
Recounts example text packs
✦ Ogre Recount
✦ The Iron Man Hogarth’s Diary
✦ The Hodgeheg Diary
✦ The Nowhere Emporium Diary
✦ The Butterfly Lion Diary
✦ The Boy at the Back of the Class Diary
✦ Charlotte’s Web Diary
✦ Harry Potter Diary
✦ The Boy Who Grew Dragons Diary
✦ Journey Diary
✦ A Dangerous Game Diary

Other popular resources:
✦ The Iron Man Complete Unit of Work | Four Weeks | Year 3/4
✦ Stig of the Dump Complete Unit of Work | Six Weeks | Year 3/4

For more resources, visit Helen-Teach’s shop.