Question Marks

The Question Mark: It Raises Some Good Questions

Question marks are pretty simple. You should use a question mark at the end of a question like this:

  • When did our professor say that essay was due?

However, there is one situation involving question marks that seems to give people a lot of trouble. What about when you have a sentence that is part statement and part question? What do you do then? You have a couple of options, depending upon the situation. You might have a sentence like this:

  • The question I have is, how are we going to get out of here?

In this case, the statement before the question isn’t complete, so you can simply use a comma to separate the statement from the question.

Of course, the sample sentence is a bit awkward, so it might be preferable to rewrite the sentence. You could change the sentence so the first part, the statement part, is a complete sentence.  In this situation, you might have a sentence like the following:

  • One question remains: How are we going to get out of here?

 

CHECKPOINT

“I wonder where John is. Do you know.” This needs a question mark after

the first sentence

both sentences

the second sentence

LICENSES AND ATTRIBUTIONS

Excelsior Online Writing Lab (OWL). Located at: https://owl.excelsior.edu/ . This site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-4.0 International License .

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ENG102 Contextualized for Health Sciences - OpenSkill Fellowship Copyright © 2022 by Compiled by Lori Walk. All Rights Reserved.

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