Punctuation

Q. What’s the accepted usage when one wants to put both a question mark and an exclamation mark? For instance, “Who could blame him” is clearly a question, but in context becomes more like an exclamation.

Q. I write for a children’s magazine in which we sometimes provide suggestions for dialogue within the text of a paragraph. Inserting commas before the quotation marks seems disruptive. Would the following be acceptable? When you feel upset, saying “I’m frustrated” or “I need a minute to cool off” can help.

Q. As you know, CMOS 6.63 says, “When a colon introduces two or more sentences . . . the first word following it is capitalized.” The two examples seem to suggest that the sentences following must comprise a series of some sort. Based on my understanding, I lowercased the first word following the colon in these two sentences:

I’ve learned at least one important thing through my bout with cancer and tragedy: everything happens for a reason. Even when I can’t see the reason, God can.

I love Ann’s poem because it expresses such an important truth: we’re not perfect. I’m not perfect by any means, and I’m not trying to put myself forward as some great role model.

My decision, however, was questioned and debated within our editorial team. Did I make the right call, per CMOS? Can you clarify what it means to “introduce” two or more sentences?

Q. At the end of a paragraph, is a single word followed by an ellipsis considered a widow? My thought is that punctuation shouldn’t be considered, and that it would be a widow, but then the ellipsis does seem more substantial than a period or other mark . . .

Q. In a sentence, a colon should always be preceded by an independent clause. Why doesn’t the Chicago Manual state this explicitly? All your examples follow the principle. Why doesn’t the manual just say that the introductory clause has to be independent?

Q. Is it acceptable to use a semicolon and and tagged onto the second-to-last item of a bulleted list? Apologies if I missed this on the CMOS site.

Q. We’re having a discussion about dialogue, suspension points, and complete sentences in my editorial department. There’s some confusion whether it’s appropriate to have a period after suspension points, such as, “He walked the dog yesterday. . . .” Is it okay to have four dots like that? Or could we say, “He walked the dog yesterday . . .”? What about other punctuation? “He walked the dog yesterday . . . !” “He walked the dog yesterday . . . ?” I guess it comes down to this: what is the appropriate use of punctuation with the ellipsis in dialogue?

Q. My colleague and I are having a debate about bulleted lists (I can almost feel you rolling your eyes at yet another list question). We are debating whether something like “Be proactive” and other imperative sentences deserve a period when written as part of a vertical list. What’s your take on this particular dilemma?

Q. I would love to have your take on an ellipsis problem. I have my children’s book MS back from the copyeditor, and I’m not sure she’s handled instances of trailing speech correctly. I would use three dots in each case. But when I check CMOS, all the examples of trailing speech with three dots consist of grammatically incomplete sentences, and mine are all grammatically complete, so maybe they do take four. Are these all correct with four dots, or should it be three? There are tales . . . What did he say the day we threw the cobs . . . I just thought I’d try . . .

Q. A colleague and I work for an educational software company that is producing a music video, but we’re unsure of the conventions for capitalizing and punctuating the subtitled lyrics. It seems like I’ve seen a lot of subtitled lyrics with pretty sparse punctuation, but we’re just not sure and haven’t been able to find any definitive answers so far. Any suggestions?