Question marks (again!)
I'm sorry, I've looked at other places here, and can't find the exact answer - maybe the searching strategy I'm using isn't good. There are some related ones, though none solving this that I can see.
If I have a question and I have another question nested in brackets (or even another sort of punctuation), do I have two question-markable statements? Examples:
“Does anyone know where the party is going to be (if, indeed, there is going to be a party?)?”
It seems odd but this second one seems less odd, because the question marks are not adjacent to each other:
“Does anyone know where the party (if there is going to be a party?) is going to be?
And then does this work for other ways of doing parentheses, for instance:
“Does anyone know where the party - if there is going to be a party? - is going to be?”
?
I'm very confused about this, because it just seems different if the question marks are at the end or in the middle, and yet the parenthetic clause, being a sub-clause, seems to demand the question mark itself.
Solution 1:
I suggest using a single question mark in the situation below. The parenthetical is not an independent clause form and it is not a question.
- “Does anyone know where the party is going to be (if, indeed, there is going to be a party)?”
In the second version, I suggest avoid repeating "going to" and party twice in the same sentence, it looks confusing. No question mark is needed in the parenthesis because it is not a question.
Original
“Does anyone know where the party (if there is going to be a party?) is going to be?
Modified
- “Does anyone know where the party (if there is one) is going to be?