Learn English – Writing style when a question mark, apostrophe mark, and a comma come together

punctuationquestion-markssentence-structure

I'm writing a sentence –

If you have a question on 'How to make french fries?', here is the answer.

MS Word shows an error because of those three tiny creatures – a question mark, a closing inverted comma, and a comma itself.

?',

Now, I wonder what to omit?

Question mark is required because it is a question. I must close the quote, so apostrophe sign is also required. A comma is also required because the sentence pauses there.

How to write it correctly?

Best Answer

I think it largely depends on style and manual guide you or your editor use. I don't think "how to make French fries" is necessarily a question that requires a question mark. The interrogative or relative adverb "how" could head a noun phrase which is the complement (object) of the preposition "on". Now, if we agree that the how phrase is not a question, we can punctuate the sentence as follows:

If you have a question on "how to make French fries", here is the answer.

or

If you have a question on how to make French fries, here is the answer.

In the first example, the quotation marks are used to emphasize the details of the question. I don't think there is a specific rule on which quotation mark to use.

Related Topic