Depending on what is
being set o by the parentheses, question marks can appear inside or outside them. If the parentheses enclose a complete sentence (or more than one, any direct questions within them end with question marks that appear within the parentheses It was cold. (But why did the water stay liquid Why were the ducks on the pond) Was winter here?”
But
if the parentheses set o a phrase, clause, or even a whole
sentence within a direct question, the whole direct question ends with a question mark outside the parentheses How cold was it (ducks were on the pond, the water was still liquid)?”
No
period ends the sentences
within the parentheses, by the way, though a question mark could have appeared within them as well if one of the parenthetical sentences was a direct question How cold was it (were there ducks on the pond was it still liquid
The example cries out for revision to eliminate the logjam of punctuation at its end and to give the reader a chance to follow what is going on. It would have been better to write several separate sentences as questions than to have knitted them together in this forced way.
With quotation marks the question mark can, again, appear either within them or outside them. If a direct question is being quoted (and not being restated
as an indirect question, then it ends with a question mark followed by quotation marks:
“is that so Or The guest asked, Is that so (The indirect question The guest asked if that was so does not end in a question mark inside or outside the quotes.)
But if quoted material appears within a direct question and does not
constitute the whole question, then the question mark appears at the end of the sentence and is not followed by quotes Was the teacher talking about the decline of the West The question mark is outside the single quote that marks only words being set o for some other reason than questioning them. The question mark is within the double quotes only because that is how examples in this book are set off.
Note that a quoted direct question followed by a statement about who is asking the question ends with a quotation mark inside the quotes and no additional punctuation until the end of the whole sentence Is that so the companion asked No
commafollows
the quoted question, although one would have been necessary if the example were not a question That is so the companion said.”
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