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Which would be correct?

What is your favorite song, and explain why? (I'm thinking this is right.)
What is your favorite song, and explain why.

This could be written as, "What is your favorite song? Explain why." But that seems kind of clunky. Looking at similar questions on this site I see that maybe there isn't a great answer to this (or maybe that this question is more straight forward than what I was looking at). I dislike the Chicago Manual of Style format, so ideally one of the two choices above would be correct.

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I consider both options you provided incorrect. If you really wanted to avoid writing the correct

What is your favourite song? Explain why.

you can write

What is your favourite song, and why?

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    Thanks for the reply. My question came from investigating the grammar of a question I had on a test ("Which choice will produce..., and explain why."). You helped clear it up for me, so thank you.
    – Hobs Crk
    Commented May 3, 2016 at 1:42
  • Okay, you'd avoid both, but which is correct?
    – Insane
    Commented May 3, 2016 at 5:44
  • @Insane Neither is correct. Both are completely ungrammatical. And cannot be used to join a question with a statement, though it can (perhaps somewhat inelegantly) be used to join a statement with a question in some contexts.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Aug 5, 2017 at 21:49

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