To the extent that a question is something that solicits an answer, I think this is a question. It's basically a stand-in for a question along the lines of "Are you listening?", "Are you ready to hear what I'm about to tell you?" or something else of that nature.
Answer from Chris Sunami on Stack ExchangeTo the extent that a question is something that solicits an answer, I think this is a question. It's basically a stand-in for a question along the lines of "Are you listening?", "Are you ready to hear what I'm about to tell you?" or something else of that nature.
Since it's not actually a question, I'm not sure if a question mark should be used or not.
For this type of conversation, I can't tell you. It's so informal by nature that the parties only need to be able to understand one another.
The person is probably writing it with a question mark because the intonation in their head was rising, indicating a question.
At the same time, it may well actually be a question, which I'll explain in a bit.
I know if you were to greet and ask a question of someone before their response, you'd use a period like this: "Hey, Matt. What are you doing?," but I'm not sure what punctuation to use in this instance.
This is the beauty of English; there are several ways to punctuate that, some leaving the sentence in question as statement, while others will show that it is a question. For example:
Hey, Matt. What are you doing?,
This is fine. One greeting and one separate question
Hey Matt, what are you doing?, Fine too. Hey Matt is a greeting or an interjection/greeting, so you can make it all one sentence (Hint: Hello is an interjection).
If you're just writing Hey [Hello] Matt, then it's not really a question and would require an exclamation point or a period.
This is such informal writing that anything you choose should be fine.
One final word, as I said above, many people do this because they want their written words to sound as if they were speaking them. So sometimes question marks are used, as I've said, to signal a rising pitch toward the end. One might do this if the statement is ambiguous or can be misconstrued.
Videos
Where is a question mark?
What is the question mark used for?
Can I combine a question mark with an exclamation mark (?! or !?)?
To the extent that a question is something that solicits an answer, I think this is a question. It's basically a stand-in for a question along the lines of "Are you listening?", "Are you ready to hear what I'm about to tell you?" or something else of that nature.
Answer from Chris Sunami on Stack ExchangeUnless there's a style guide telling you otherwise, I'd suggest basing your decision on whether you mean the literal words 'yes' and 'no', or the general nature of the response. Consider:
Why would he say, "No"? (For that is the word that he said.)
vs
Why would he say no? (What he actually said was "Over my dead body", but let's not worry about that detail.)
In both the answer is no and say no, quotes are relatively uncommon. The Corpus of Contemporary American English gives these results:
the answer is no 484 hits
the answer is " no 27 hits (including punctuation variants)
[say] no 8891 hits
[say] " no " 521 hits (including punctuation variants)
However there are only 10 yesses and 30 yeses, so you might want to reword that one (perhaps The votes are in: 3 in favor and 4 against).
My subjective impression is that it is better style to omit the quotes. Your style, of course, is up to you.
I'm terrible with punctuation. Heck, I'm sure the punctuation in my title is incorrect!
Anyway, if I start a sentence with the word 'yes', what punctuation do I use?
For example:
Someone says: "Have you contacted Mark yet?"
I reply with: "Yes - I called him earlier."
"Yes; I called him earlier."
"Yes, I called him earlier."
Thanks for your help - I love this subreddit!
Example : “How many times have I watched this video?” “Yes.”
Edit:
I always see the sentences like the example sentence on social media these days so I thought it was like a meme, also I guessed it was a funny things. But some people say that it’s not hilarious at all…😂
Also, I could know it’s too casual to use in a formal situation and we can use the way of answering for “or” questions too.
Thanks for all of your help!!