Depending on the structure of a sentence a question mark might need to be placed in different positions, so it’s good to understand these general rules.

Sentences with Quotation Marks

If your question is asked by the person who said the original quote then the question mark must be placed inside to indicate this. If however, you are asking a question about a quote, then you must keep the question mark outside of the quotation marks to avoid confusion. Here is how it would look:

“Should we go to the park?” she asked – here the original speaker is asking the question, so the question mark must be included in the quotation marks.

Do you agree with the idea that “the past does not define our future”? – because the question is being asked about the quote, it must be included outside the quotation marks to indicate that the sentence as a whole is the question, rather than the quote itself.