Question e-mailed by Jhumur Dasgupta, December 26, 2011:
Hi,
I am a journalism student and I came across your posts on English usage. I am a regular visitor of your forum.
Recently, I came across this headline in a website:
Why are there less women CEOs, asks the professor
This looks a bit odd to me. I feel it should be
Why are there less women CEOs? asks the professor
or
Why there are less women CEOs? asks the professor
Can you please suggest a better way to handle such headlines?
Thanks,
Jhumur D
My reply to Jhumur:
This headline from that website is indeed odd and, even worse, grammatically and syntactically wrong:
Why are there less women CEOs, asks the professor
Your first suggested alternative construction is grammatically and syntactically correct:
Why are there less women CEOs? asks the professor
It properly deploys the question mark where it should be—right after the question without quotes and not after the attribution.
This second suggested construction of yours is grammatically flawed, however, for it puts a question mark after a question constructed as a declarative statement:
Why there are less women CEOs? asks the professor
For the above headline to be grammatically correct and more elegant sounding, the attribution should be positioned ahead of the declarative form of the question and the question mark dispensed with, as follows:
Professor asks why there are less women CEOs
To dramatize the question, of course, we can also restructure the above headline as follows:
Professor asks: Why are there less women CEOs?
Take your pick from the last two constructions above.
