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Comments on Ending a line of dialogue with "?!": Allowed or obnoxious?

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Ending a line of dialogue with "?!": Allowed or obnoxious?

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A dialogue of mine contains the following sentence:

"You fired all three of them?!"

Trouble is, I'm not sure I've ever seen a novel that used a question mark and an exclamation point together - it's something I normally see in comic strips and the like. Is using the two punctuation marks together only acceptable in certain forms of writing, or is it safe to use it in a novel without it appearing childish and/or obnoxious?

Using just the question mark doesn't really create the effect I'm aiming for.

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General comments (1 comment)
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Of course it's allowed, but only if you punctuate it correctly! The mark you want to use is known as an interrobang.

Say what‽

Yes that's right, there are more punctuation marks available than they teach you in grade school.

Shady Characters has a great pair of blog posts on the history and usage of the interrobang. Thankfully with its place in the Unicode spec secure and many fonts doing a better job of covering wider ranges of glyphs in recent years it has become much more widely available than it was in centuries past.

Use it with discretion. It's easy to over use, but sometimes it's just the right tool for the job.

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General comments (3 comments)
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ArtOfCode‭ wrote almost 5 years ago

The downside of this, of course, is that it's unfamiliar to quite a number of people, so consider your audience carefully.

Caleb‭ wrote almost 5 years ago · edited almost 5 years ago

@ArtOfCode I get it. And yes sometimes that will make people do a double take, so if your goal is to not be distracting this might not be for you. But sometimes that's an upside though! And in spite of being unfamiliar I have yet to run across anybody that couldn't figure out what it meant in context. Mostly I needed something to try out this site / platform, and most of the questions on here are out of my league. This one was irresistible.

Monica Cellio‭ wrote almost 5 years ago

Welcome @Caleb. If you of a more technical bent, we do have questions on technical writing, API documentation, (code) examples, and more. Also scientific and academic writing.