At 05:39 PM 10/11/97 +0000, you wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>Sender:       Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
>              <[log in to unmask]>
>Poster:       Wendy Johnson <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject:      Re: Period or Question Mark?
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>What about simply writing the following sentence?
>
>The question is, what do we do now?
>
>That is the punctuation and capitalization that makes the most sense to me.
>After all, this really *is* a question, not an indirect question.
>
I'm sorry, Wendy, but I can't agree.  The above is a declarative sentence:
Subject = *question*
Verb = *is*
Complement = *what ... now.*
 
I would also drop the comma unless I were to put the complement in the form
of a quotation (in which case I would keep the question mark).
 
Pragmatically yours,
 
Paul E. Doniger