How would you punctuate the following sentence, and others like it? Are there any precedents, or applicable style guides?
The question is what are we going to do about it?
No rephrasing, please.
Answer
This is a direct question expressed within a declarative sentence that declares the question to be a question. We answered this last week. The sentence should be written one of two ways:
The question is, "What are we going to do about it?"
or
The question is: "What are we going to do about it?"
There are some other possibilities, but these are the two major contenders.
This is not a rhetorical question unless there is no answer or unless the answer has already been provided and you're not asking for a real answer. In any case, it doesn't affect the orthography or punctuation.
No comments:
Post a Comment