6.1.1.11: 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?