: Re: Questions with flat tone in dialogue I'm sure we have all heard people say questions without putting the tone inflection on the end. I am writing a novel and I have a piece of dialogue

@Gloria285

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Of course you can. Orthography serves you as the author in your efforts to accurately convey the narrative. A question mark there would convey the wrong thing.

Not all sentences that start with question-words are questions, anyway. Particularly when the dialogue should not be inflected as a question would, it’s doubly useful to avoid cuing the reader to read it wrong.

You’ll find such things in novels, often with additional narration to affirm what the punctuation is suggesting. Things like:

“Why are you here.” Every line in his body echoed his dead tone. It wasn’t a question, she knew. It was a warning.

(Note that I’m currently writing a novel in a close third POV, so my example is too. Use less reported thought for other POVs.)

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