The English Oracle

Punctuation of an exclamative question

--------------------------------------------------
Hire the world's top talent on demand or became one of them at Toptal: https://topt.al/25cXVn
and get $2,000 discount on your first invoice
--------------------------------------------------

Take control of your privacy with Proton's trusted, Swiss-based, secure services.
Choose what you need and safeguard your digital life:
Mail: https://go.getproton.me/SH1CU
VPN: https://go.getproton.me/SH1DI
Password Manager: https://go.getproton.me/SH1DJ
Drive: https://go.getproton.me/SH1CT


Music by Eric Matyas
https://www.soundimage.org
Track title: Magic Ocean Looping

--

Chapters
00:00 Punctuation Of An Exclamative Question
00:18 Answer 1 Score 2
00:52 Accepted Answer Score 6
01:43 Thank you

--

Full question
https://english.stackexchange.com/questi...

--

Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...

--

Tags
#punctuation #questionmark #exclamationmark

#avk47



ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 6


According to the Interrobang wikipedia page, this symbol [‽] has been created to convey the meaning of your question. Using it you ask "a question in an excited manner, express excitement or disbelief in the form of a question, or ask a rhetorical question."

But, always in that page, you can see it's a nonstandard symbol, so like it says, "in standard English, the same inflection is usually notated by ending a sentence with first a question mark and then an exclamation mark."

Now, it's also true that in an informal context, most people won't really care about it, but if you must choose a "line", it's that one.
Concerning formal writing, I'd suggest to avoid any of these and focus on the wording to convey the "exclamative" tone of the question.




ANSWER 2

Score 2


The question mark and exclamation point should not be used together as in your examples 1 and 2.

The simple solution here would be to use the exclamation point only, treating the sentence as an indirection question:

What are you doing?

Yet, there are other ways of indicating emphasis. Consider italicizing the key word (from your perspective):

What are you doing?

Or, you could employ additional text for clarification, e.g.:

"What are you doing?" she shouted at him.