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Correct punctuation
Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2017 10:46 pm
by JayBlue
I'm having trouble knowing the correct punctuation at the end of a sentence that has both a question mark and an exclamation point. Which punctuation goes first?
Is this correct?
"Is this a sentence with correct punctuation?!"
Or is this correct?
"Is this a sentence with correct punctuation!?"
Re: Correct punctuation
Posted: Sat Jul 22, 2017 12:51 am
by SundownKid
According to Wikipedia, both ways of writing it are fine.
Re: Correct punctuation
Posted: Sat Jul 22, 2017 10:20 am
by Milkymalk
I feel that !? is generally more common than ?! though and I personally find it visually more appealing.
Re: Correct punctuation
Posted: Sat Jul 22, 2017 11:33 am
by YonYonYon
I always felt like "?!" is more like a question with exclamation undertones and "!?" is more like an exclamation with questioning undertones
Re: Correct punctuation
Posted: Fri Jul 28, 2017 7:14 pm
by Katy133
YonYonYon wrote: ↑Sat Jul 22, 2017 11:33 am
I always felt like "
?!" is more like a
question with exclamation undertones and "
!?" is more like an
exclamation with questioning undertones
"?!" is what I use too, since generally, the reader needs to know that a sentence is a "question" first and a "shout" second.
Re: Correct punctuation
Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2017 2:21 pm
by Yolo400
YonYonYon wrote: ↑Sat Jul 22, 2017 11:33 am
I always felt like "
?!" is more like a
question with exclamation undertones and "
!?" is more like an
exclamation with questioning undertones
This... kind of...
"Huh!?" = Exclaimed surprise.
"Huh?!" = Surprised exclamation.
Re: Correct punctuation
Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2017 10:08 pm
by arisan
Abiding by conservative rules of grammar, you would, in fact, use only one of them. Generally, it would be the exclamation point, as a question can be inferred from the context and sentence construction. Conversely, you could simply use the question mark if the sentence structure is ambiguous, but the strength of emotion is conveyed by other means.
Posting a response from English StackExchange, though it's worth checking the
full (quite short) thread.
I think if you ask the experts who would claim that they know what the “correct” way to punctuate something is, they would tell you that a sentence may only have one terminal punctuation mark—that is to say, neither “?!” nor “!?” is correct.
So, no matter what order you use, you’ll never please those people. The Corpus of Contemporary American English has 3742 examples of “?!” and 1197 examples of “!?”. Clearly both orderings enjoy substantial usage, although it does appear that “?!” enjoys a majority of usage, probably because most sentences that get the double punctuation treatment are syntactically questions that have an exclamation point added for emphasis.
Edit: I checked in the British National Corpus, and it has 224 instances of “?!” and 121 instances of “!?”.