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I'm sorry, I've looked at other places here, and can't find the exact answer - maybe the searching strategy I'm using isn't good. There are some related ones, though none solving this that I can see.

If I have a question and I have another question nested in brackets (or even another sort of punctuation), do I have two question-markable statements? Examples:

“Does anyone know where the party is going to be (if, indeed, there is going to be a party?)?”

It seems odd but this second one seems less odd, because the question marks are not adjacent to each other:

“Does anyone know where the party (if there is going to be a party?) is going to be?

And then does this work for other ways of doing parentheses, for instance:

“Does anyone know where the party - if there is going to be a party? - is going to be?”

?

I'm very confused about this, because it just seems different if the question marks are at the end or in the middle, and yet the parenthetic clause, being a sub-clause, seems to demand the question mark itself.

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I suggest using a single question mark in the situation below. The parenthetical is not an independent clause form and it is not a question.

  1. “Does anyone know where the party is going to be (if, indeed, there is going to be a party)?”

In the second version, I suggest avoid repeating "going to" and party twice in the same sentence, it looks confusing. No question mark is needed in the parenthesis because it is not a question.

Original

“Does anyone know where the party (if there is going to be a party?) is going to be?

Modified

  1. “Does anyone know where the party (if there is one) is going to be?
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  • I suppose that might not have been the greatest example...it serves a partial purpose, but rather than the particular item there, what if the item in the brackets was truly a question, potentially not closely related. So maybe like: 'does anyone know where the party is (and is there anyone who has a car and can give me a lift)? I was looking to see if there was a more general rule on this...
    – Jonathan Jewell
    Sep 14, 2019 at 9:12
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    @JonathanJewell that would have made a better question and I probably would not have answered. This one was relatively straightforward to answer :) I would still suggest sticking with the one question mark as you did in the example above.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Sep 14, 2019 at 9:14
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    I would make the parenthesis a new sentence in that case.
    – Kate Bunting
    Sep 15, 2019 at 8:20

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