A difficult part of writing for me is when a single sentence–especially dialogue–contains two tones. It sounds best as a single sentence, but ending with a period, or alternative punctuation, looks wrong. As well as this, using two sentences also looks wrong.
I can’t think of a great example right now, but I know I’ve wanted punctuation that doesn’t exist before. I’ve had moments where it would have been so useful to have a “;!” and a “;?” mark.
¿Perhaps something like this:
?
Out of all the additions to punctuation I’ve seen this is the one I find myself needing most often. Interrobangs are easily written as “?!” and even most other ones can be quick fixed with storytelling like “said lovingly”, “said with authority” and whatnot.
But “Is that the best, or is it just what we have?” is an absolutely horrible thing to write punctuation for when you mean it as two connected questions like “Is that the best? Or is it just what we have?”
It should obviously be replaced with a question comma. There are so many cases where you also have the question in the middle of the sentence such as “Is that okay (question comma) because I don’t think so…”
I’ve thought the same thing many times. I love interrobang (not least of which for it’s kickass name), but the same sentiment can be expressed in other ways. Dialogue can convey the others, but if you want to recreate the way humans actually speak English, you need a mid sentence punctuation, like a comma, that can express questioning. Even in speech, we change our intonation to be higher when questioning, and we do that sometimes in the middle of a sentence. It’s just not conveyable perfectly with our current set of symbols.
Exactly this. If you know what a semicolon and question mark/exclamation point’s purpose is, then you know how this punctuation works. The best tool is that which requires no manual at all. Occam’s Razor, or something along those lines.
¡It’s immediately, perfectly understandable! :k