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The questions "Who?", "What?", "When?", "Where?", "How?", and "Why?" remain unanswered.

She was tired of his "Where were you?", "How many drinks did you have?", and " Were you unfaithful to me?" questions.

Please, no recasts.

Thank you.

whippoorwill
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  • @curiousdannii: I think you're absolutely right. I don't know why someone CVd for a different reason (I take it that wasn't you! :) – FumbleFingers Mar 08 '15 at 03:50
  • @FumbleFingers I don't have the rep to CV here – curiousdannii Mar 08 '15 at 03:51
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    You certainly shouldn't put the commas inside the quotes. And omitting the commas (except the Oxford one) is clearly untenable. So either you need to recast it or punctuate it the way you have. – Peter Shor Mar 08 '15 at 04:06
  • Are these correct, then? She asked, "You did what?", trying to make him feel guilty.

    She shouted "Come back!", as if he were finally ready to listen to reason

     – whippoorwill Mar 08 '15 at 04:28
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    You could leave off the comma after the question mark/exclamation point in those, and I believe some style manuals recommend that you do so. See this Grammar Girl blog entry. – Peter Shor Mar 08 '15 at 04:56
  • She asked, "You did what?" trying to make him feel guilty. She shouted, "Come back!" as if he were finally ready to listen to reason. (Like that?) – whippoorwill Mar 08 '15 at 04:57
  • I believe that in AmE we would punctuate thus: The questions "Who?" "What?" "When?" "Where?" "How?" and "Why?" remain unanswered.

    She was tired of his "Where were you?" "How many drinks did you have?" and "Were you unfaithful to me?" questions. (The ending quote marks could function as second commas and avoid an overkill of punctuation. Agreed?)

     – whippoorwill Mar 08 '15 at 05:02
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    I think you need to leave in the commas separating items in a list of quotes. The sentence looks horrible otherwise. And I haven't seen any style guides that actually address this case (as opposed to commas separating quotes from unquoted material, which they do address). – Peter Shor Mar 08 '15 at 05:06
  • In the specific case of a series of one-word wh- questions (who, what, when, where, why, and how), some writers capitalise each word and follow it with ?, and some dont' even bother with that. But I can't see any instances in the first few page of Google Books results there where the writer has chosen to set off each individual word in quote marks. Unsurprisingly, since it's ugly, unnecessary, and distracting to the reader. – FumbleFingers Mar 08 '15 at 12:45

1 Answers1

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With expository prose, punctuation is a matter of convention and the preferences of the house style sheet; with literary prose, it's a matter of authorial/editorial preference.

I take the original question to be an example of the latter. There, one could dispense with the commas and italics could be used instead of quotation marks if one liked:

The questions Who? What? When? Where? How and Why? remained unanswered.

Where were you? How many drinks did you have? Were you unfaithful to me? She was tired of his questions.

TimR
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