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Question Marks 3733 Views
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Want even more deets on Question Marks? Click here to review. Or take a look at our entire grammar section for all the goods.
Transcript
- 00:04
Question marks, a la Shmoop. We all know what simple, direct questions
- 00:08
look like:
- 00:09
What's two plus two?
- 00:11
Is this bread gluten-free?
- 00:13
What's the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
Full Transcript
- 00:17
Because these are direct questions, they require question marks.
- 00:21
There are other scenarios, however, where you may be unsure about whether or not a question
- 00:25
mark is needed.
- 00:27
For example, take the simple declarative sentence, “Jim has two coconuts and he's banging them
- 00:32
together.”
- 00:33
What if you were surprised to see Jim with those coconuts, though? How would you express
- 00:37
that surprise?
- 00:39
You would add a question mark to the end of the sentence to get, “Jim has two coconuts
- 00:43
and he's banging them together?” Then, there's the question flurry. This isn't
- 00:48
a winter weather condition you encounter in the Midwest...
- 00:51
...but rather a string of add-on questions tacked on to an initial direct question.
- 00:58
For example, if you were desperate to stay out for as long as possible on Saturday night,
- 01:02
you might ask your mom, “Can I stay out until 11:00? 11:05? 11:15? 11:30?”
- 01:08
Or, if you needed more time to finish your algebra exam, you might ask your teacher,
- 01:12
“May I have ten more minutes? fifteen minutes? thirty minutes? the rest of the day?”
- 01:17
Each add-on question gets its own question mark.
- 01:20
Also, don't capitalize the first letter of an add-on question unless the question could
- 01:25
stand on its own as a sentence. Let's move on to tag questions. Say you have
- 01:30
the statement, “That's the Holy Hand Grenade.”
- 01:33
Tack a tag question on to that sentence...
- 01:34
...so that you end up with, “That's the Holy Hand Grenade, isn't it?”...
- 01:38
...and suddenly your statement requires a question mark.
- 01:42
Next come indirect questions. Examples of indirect questions include, “I wonder why
- 01:47
the Black Knight is so delusional”...
- 01:49
...and, “I wonder why the French use farm animals as weaponry.”
- 01:53
Because statements where you wonder about things are indirect, rather than direct, questions...
- 01:58
...they do not end with question marks. But what happens when you mix direct questions
- 02:03
with indirect questions? Do rivers run backward? Does the world explode?
- 02:07
Well, no. You would write out a direct-indirect question to read, “The question is, who
- 02:13
were the Knights who say “Ni! <<knee>> ”?”...
- 02:17
...where you place a comma after the first clause and a question mark after the direct
- 02:22
question.
- 02:23
You could also avoid the direct-indirect question nonsense altogether by writing, “Everyone
- 02:28
wondered who the Knights who say “Ni!” were.”
- 02:31
The grammar rules for question marks might… raise a few questions…
- 02:35
…but as long as you practice what you've learned, you should be able to triumph over
- 02:38
this particular grammar conundrum...
- 02:39
...just like the Black Knight. Oh, wait...
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