What is End Punctuation?
Most writers are familiar with the punctuation that should be used at the end of every sentence. However, the following provides a quick review and brings up some style elements to consider when deciding how to end a sentence. There are three punctuation marks that come at the end of a sentence: the period ( . ), the question mark ( ? ), and the exclamation point ( ! ). A sentence is always followed by a single space, no matter what the concluding punctuation is.
Periods
Periods indicate a neutral sentence, and are by far the most common ending punctuation mark. They’re at the end of every sentence on this page so far. They occur at the end of statements. While two spaces after periods used to be the norm, now just one space is standard.
Question Marks
A question mark comes at the end of a question (How was class today?). A rhetorical question is asked to make a point, and an answer is not expected (Why does it always have to rain on the first day of class?). Some questions are used principally as polite requests (Would you pass the salt?).
All of these questions can be categorized as direct questions, and all of these questions require a question mark at their ends.
Indirect Questions
Indirect questions do not have question marks at their ends. They can be used in many of the same ways as declarative ones, but they often emphasize uncertainty or lack of knowledge:
Example 1
I can’t guess how Tamika managed it.
I wonder whether I looked that bad.
Cecil asked where the reports were.
Notice that different word order is used in direct and indirect questions: in direct questions, the verb usually comes before the subject, while in indirect questions, the verb appears second.
What about when you have a sentence that is part statement and part question? What do you do then? You have a couple of options, depending upon the situation. You might have a sentence like this:
Example 2
The question I have is, how are we going to get out of here?
In this case, the statement before the question isn’t complete, so you can simply use a comma to separate the statement from the question.
Of course, the sample sentence is a bit awkward, so it might be preferable to rewrite the sentence. You could change the sentence so the first part, the statement part, is a complete sentence. In this situation, you might have a sentence like the following:
Example 3
One question remains: How are we going to get out of here?
Exclamation Points
The exclamation point is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or high volume, and it often marks the end of a sentence. You’ve likely seen it overused on the internet.
While this kind of statement is excessive, there are appropriate ways to use exclamation points. A sentence ending in an exclamation mark may be an exclamation (such as “Wow!” or “Boo!”), or an imperative (“Stop!”), or it may indicate astonishment: “They were the footprints of a gigantic duck!”