Comments on Ending a line of dialogue with "?!": Allowed or obnoxious?
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Ending a line of dialogue with "?!": Allowed or obnoxious?
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.
It's acceptable, but should be reserved for rare occasions where it's absolutely necessary to keep the flow of the scene …
4y ago
The combination "?!" has been in common usage enough that the interrobang (‽) was suggested as a punctuation mark to rep …
4y ago
Of course it's allowed, but only if you punctuate it correctly! The mark you want to use is known as an interrobang. …
4y ago
I just ran a search on all of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files for the '?!' mark. Why this series in particular? 1. It's mod …
4y ago
I don't have a problem with '?!', I think people understand it, so it is fair game. I would have a problem with the i …
4y ago
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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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