Constant Content

Hi Writers,

When you include a question within a question or a question within a statement, they must be punctuated and capitalized according to rules that apply to speech.

Examples:
Have you ever asked yourself, "How can I make more money?"

You may have asked yourself in the past, "How can I make more money?"

These punctuation marks help to clarify for the reader. Please abide by these rules. More information can be found at:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/577/01/

Thanks,
Ed

I'm so happy to know that I'm not crazy. I've always felt that asking a question within a question or statement should be in quotes like the examples above. I was criticized on another writing site for doing it. I knew that elementary school education in Germany would come in handy one day.

Did this person reference an authoritative source? I'm curious because, stylisitcally, some authors choose to remove all quotation marks from dialogue. (There was an article we discussed awhile back about this: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122489468502968839.html .)But there was a general agreement that this isn't the best way to go.

Ed

No, they didn't reference any sources. Their gripe was that it was an article without dialog. Let's take your examples...

Have you ever asked yourself, "How can I make more money?"

You may have asked yourself in the past, "How can I make more money?"

The funny thing is that they're both technically dialog. You are showing someone asking themselves a question within your question. After reading the article you provided the link to, I have to say it's probably laziness and a poor education from American public schools (with a bit of internet culture). Just reading the examples gave me a headache. In a few of those I wasn't even sure if it was dialog at all.

First it was the ellipses, comma and semicolon, and now it's quotation marks. I wonder if capitalization will be next. Ninety percent of the email I get is typed without the first word of each sentence being capitalized. Even the letters I get from my daughters teachers are filled with errors. How long will it be before goodest, dumberer, and bestest are in the dictionary at this rate?

Yeah - even if it's not actually spoken, it's still speech, albeit hypothetical speech.

Without quotation marks, the sentences would have to look like:

Have you ever asked yourself if you could make more money? /Have you ever asked yourself how you could make more money?

You may have asked yourself in the past how you could make more money.