Question

What punctuation do you use for an interrogative sentence that ends with a quotation?

Answer 1

Hint: Remember that the word ‘interrogative’ means that a question is put forward. So an interrogative sentence will be a sentence that takes the question form. Quotation marks have various uses; it is used to either express someone else’s statement or to refer to a particular entity like a place or a movie or something with a title.

Complete answer:
Any interrogative sentence is one that is used to make a query or ask a question. So interrogative sentences, being of the question form need to end with a specific punctuation mark commonly called the ‘question mark’ that looks like this ‘?’.

Any interrogative sentence, whether it includes other punctuation or not, must always finish with a question mark (?). The scenario given in the question says that the interrogative sentence ends with a quotation.

Take an example of such a sentence; let the sentence be a question (without punctuation)
Does the protagonist die at the end of “Teen Wolf”
So here we see that “Teen Wolf” is put in quotations, but the sentence is originally an interrogative sentence, so we need to punctuate the sentence. This interrogative sentence will definitely end with a question mark, so the punctuated sentence will look like this;

Does the protagonist die at the end of “Teen Wolf”?
Note that for punctuating the sentence, we do not need to make any change to the existing sentence. We can directly place the punctuation at the end of the statement. We do not need to place the punctuation inside the quotation. But if in case there is already a question mark within the quotation, we must not get confused, we just need to add the ‘?’ after the quotation.

Take another case where the phrase within the quotation already ends with a question mark. That kind of quotation might contain the name of a song that ends with ‘?’, the name of a book that ends with ‘?’ or anything with a name that already ends in ‘?’.

Example: Did you listen to the song “Is it I?”?
In the above example the name of the song Is it I? is already ending in a question mark, but since the statement asked is interrogative, we again put a question mark at the end of the quotation.

Note: Just like using interrogative sentences, we can use sentences that give away different tones. There can be statements that are factual, sometimes statements can be a command or a request and otherwise, statements can be to express an emotion. So for each tone conveyed, we can use different types of sentences that can be declarative, imperative or exclamatory.