Learn English – How to write a question with a suggested answer at the end

grammarpunctuationquestions

How do you properly convey in writing a sentence where a question is asked and followed by a suggested answer? For example, the question "What are we having for dinner?" is asked, and the guess "lasagna?" is given. Which is grammatically correct:

What are we having for dinner? Lasagna?

What are we having for dinner, lasagna?

or something else.

I guess I should also ask, is it grammatically correct to say

What are we having for dinner — lasagna?

Best Answer

"What are we having for dinner? Lasagna?" - this is correct. The intonation on a question is different from declarative sentences. When speaking this out loud the intonation would make it clear that there are two questions. To describe this in text you have to therefore use two question marks.

"What are we having for dinner, lasagna?" - This might be ambiguous and sounds like you are asking a question to "lasagna" (there are all sorts of uncommon names out there) , similar to "What are we having for dinner, Mum?"

You can, of course, change the question to "We are having lasagna for dinner right?" (as per Jim's answer) or "Are we having lasagna for dinner?" or even, in some contexts, convert to a suggestion "would I love some lasagna today!"

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