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