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Topic : Is it a bad writing practice to end a paragraph with question? I'm not sure where I picked up this habit. Here are two examples: I pictured An-Mei’s slim fingers running across their - selfpublishingguru.com

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I'm not sure where I picked up this habit. Here are two examples:

I pictured An-Mei’s slim fingers running across their smooth surface,
her hand, and then the body connected to it. But try as I might, I
couldn’t recall her face. All I saw were scattered facial features
that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t put together; they were
like jigsaw pieces that slipped from my hands the moment I grabbed
them. Was time capable of erasing such memories?

The trail turned into
a sharp curve, a mountain of fens blocking what lay ahead. I circled
around it.



She was short and relatively thin. Her hair was cut at the forehead
with two long strands hanging limply above her shoulders. She was
wearing a red knit cap, a white cotton sweater, and a plaid skirt that
reached just below her knees. On top of all that, she had a thick
leather jacket. Comfortable clothes. Not the kind you’d bring to a
hiking trip, though. What was she doing standing there?

Following her
line of vision, I realized she was staring at a huge ancient tree.

I guess my intention was to use the question to connect the paragraph to the next one (or to give the paragraph a summary/ending). Does this feel amateurish? If so, what should I be doing instead?


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You are the proctor though. You are essentially giving birth to what never existed before.
I have to say honestly I loved your writing.
The flow; the eb.
It reads fast like a dreamer's anticipation.
You can feel the unfolding of the story upon a page when you end with a question mark.
It creates a pause. Although many do not partake in doing so; who is to say that your way may not be the new way.
Perhaps the world has something to learn from you.

I say when you feel the desire to end with a question mark do so. You did it quite well. Flow wasn't comprised it's velocity was simply fine tuned up.


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Totally fine in prose writing. Where it gets iffy is in formal writings like cover letters and scholarly essays. You really need a license to do so in these occasions or else it is kind of seen as lazy. But as far as your case in concerned, completely acceptable.


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When you have a question like that in narration, you are essentially narrating the protagonist's thoughts. If you put quotes around them, or italicized them, and made them present tense, they would be dialogue.

As long as you keep that in mind (and don't overuse the technique, as Watercleave correctly notes), it's perfectly fine to do.


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I've certainly never heard of it being wrong to end paragraphs with questions, and it doesn't seem wrong to my eye. In fact, I don't think it's even a question of grammar; it seems to be more of a stylistic choice.

If that's your writing style, go for it. It works well in the extracts you included, and in general I'd say it's a good way to create a more "personal" narrative style with a first-person narrator. Like all elements of writing style, you should just be wary of overdoing it; ending every paragraph with a question would bug me quite a lot after a while.


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