PUNCTUATION

Question marks

A sentence that asks a QUESTION ends with a question mark.  This has its own built-in full stop and replaces the usual full stop.

Why do meerkats live in social groups?

Who would have believed that we would one day set foot on the moon?

"Is your mother keeping well?"

"Why are you late?"

These are DIRECT QUESTIONS.

However, it should be noted that INDIRECT QUESTIONS (which are merely being reported and not asked) do not require a question mark.

He asked if my mother was keeping well.

She questioned why I was late.

Where a question is part of DIRECT SPEECH, the question mark should be included at the end of the sentence within a sentence.

"Is your mother keeping well?" he asked.

Sally asked, "Why are you late?".

Introduction - Capital letters - Full stops - Question Marks - Exclamation marks - Abbreviations - Contractions - Commas - Speech marks (Quotation marks - Inverted comas) - Possessive apostrophes - Colons - Semi-colons - Brackets - Hyphens - Dashes - Obliques (slashes)