rhetorical question--which is one asked because the answer is the
quite apparent fact the speaker wants to impress upon his hearers--is
an effective method of making a seemingly personal appeal to sluggish
intellects or lazy wills. The interrogative form has the same
disadvantage as the exclamatory. Except when its answer is perfectly
plain it transfers no meaning. It would be easily possible for a
speaker with no ideas at all, no knowledge of a topic, to engage time
and attention by merely constructing a series of questions. At the
conclusion the audience would wonder why in the world he spoke, for he
had so little to say.

Long and Short Sentences. So far as long and short sentences are
concerned some general rules have already been hinted at in dealing
with other kinds. The advantages of the short sentence are mainly
those of clearness, directness, emphasis. Its dangers are monotony,
bareness, over-compactness. The advantages of the long--that is, quite
long--sentence, are rather difficult to comprehend. A wordy sentence
is likely to defeat its own purpose. Instead of guiding it will lose
its hearer. Somewhat long sentences--as already said--will serve in
general discussions, in rapidly moving descriptive and narrative
passages, in rather simple explanation and argument. No one can state
at just what number of words a short sentence becomes medium, and when
the division of medium becomes long. Yet there must be some limits. A
sentence in _Les Miserables_ includes nearly one thousand words in
both French original and English translation. John Milton produced
some extraordinarily long sentences. But these are in written
discourse. Some modern speakers have come dangerously near the limit.
In one printed speech one sentence has four hundred ten words in it; a
later one goes to five hundred forty. This second would fill about
half a column of the usual newspaper. Surely these are much too long.
A speaker can frequently make a long sentence acceptable by breaking
it up into shorter elements by sensible pauses. Yet the general
direction must surely be: avoid sentences which are too long.

Variety. The paramount rule of sentence structure in speech-making is
certainly: secure variety. Long, medium, short; declarative,
exclamatory, interrogative; simple, loose, periodic; use them all as
material permits and economy of time and attention prescribes. With
the marvelous variety possible in English sentence structure, no
perso