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Originally Posted by RobertDDL
But Harry's example was
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Did she say "It is raining"?
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But what if she exclaimed "It is raining!"?  |
Indeed my example was intentionally altered (as I said, "just for fun") to highlight the distinction between comma and period versus question and exclamation marks.
New Hart's Rules (Oxford style), say that "only one mark of terminal punctuation is needed". Review Harry's original example in your quote, and realise the period from the inner quote has been dropped, so dropping either the exclamation or question mark would seem appropriate. I can't find an explicit rule about precedence of terminal punctuation, but I would generally drop the exclamation mark and keep the question mark.
Edited to add:
I finally got my hands on a copy of
The Cambridge Guide to English Usage* and it addresses this issue explicitly (if not any more helpfully than I did): "Double question marks (??), or combinations of exclamation and question marks (!? or ?!), are to be avoided except in informal writing (and in chess). Where they might appear on either side of closing quotation marks (because one belongs to the quote, and the other to the carrier sentence), the sentence should be rearranged to avoid it."
* You can never have too many style guides: it makes me feel better to see diverse experts all taking subtly different positions on what is correct, and when you need some excuse to procrastinate you can start trying to work out whether you should be typing "installment" or "instalment", with the help of a dozen different authoritative references. (The Cambridge guide has quite an interesting discussion - noting that the original Oxford Dictionary set them as equal alternatives, and suggests the modern adoption of "instalment" in the UK might have come about because the US adopted "installment". All this I learned while I could have been wasting time working!
)