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For example, if the title of the piece of writing is "Can We Know The Universe?" and I want to embed this into a question, where would the question mark belonging to my sentence go? I assume it would be placed outside the quotation marks, so the sample sentence would be:

What does Carl Sagan assert with his example about table salt in "Can We Know The Universe?"?

The two question marks separated by the quotation marks is awkward, but is it correct in terms of formatting? What would the correct formatting be?

KillingTime
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Yu Le
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    Answer here: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/270935/206976 – Tinfoil Hat Sep 27 '21 at 01:51
  • This question is about a title ending in a period (more unusual, but same principle, and there's still no perfect solution): https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/448108/punctuation-in-books-articles-title – Stuart F Sep 27 '21 at 12:16

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According to the proscriptive rules of English grammar as presented by the Purdue Online Writing Lab, you should place punctuation such as questions marks after quotations (i.e. outside the quotation marks) if, for example, the question mark applies to the sentence as a whole. I can’t see any reason why that would change if the quotation ends in a question mark.

So your example ‘What does Carl Sagan assert with his example about table salt in "Can We Know The Universe?"?’ is correct.

I agree that the ‘?”?’ looks extremely awkward and I think the best solution would be to reformat the sentence to something like

In his example about table salt in “Can we Know the Universe?”, what does Carl Sagan assert?.

Also as you can see I don’t follow a number of the “rules” made up and promulgated by grammarians; many of them are arbitrary and contrary to actual language use in various dialects of English, so (please excuse the pun) take this all with a grain of salt.

KillingTime
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andyharbor
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  • Haha I appreciate the pun. Thanks for your help! – Yu Le Sep 27 '21 at 01:05
  • Pointing to a more general rule and then reasoning 'I can’t see any reason why that would change' in a particular case, is certainly a defensible way of handling the matter if one is not bound by a style manual that specifically addresses such cases. Some, however, do explicitly address the cases that the OP is inquiring about, as can be seen from the higher-scored answer to the question of which this one is a duplicate. – jsw29 Sep 27 '21 at 16:59
  • I meant that in a purely literal sense. The rule as stated is that if the question mark applies to the sentence as a whole, it goes outside the quotation marks. No qualifications. So from those facts I can only infer that that applies to all cases. The answer you are referring to may be higher scored, but it’s just a link to a different, related but not identical in form or answer, question, for which you have provided a too-specific answer to a different question. So I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here. – andyharbor Sep 28 '21 at 05:00