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Turantual Posted 9 years ago
Grammar

How to punctuate a string of paraphrases in one sentence?

I'm being interviewed for a magazine article and I'm answering written questions. For one response I want to give examples of questions that people have asked me. I don't have exact quotes. I can only paraphrase the questions. So, what I've written so far goes something like this:

During these online discussions, I would field many questions from people building their own widgets.  They would ask questions like "How do I make my widget do this?", "How can I get widgets to do that?" or "How do I make this widget behave like the other thing?"

**Names have been changed to protect the innocent. ;-)**

Now, I'm pretty sure this sentence is grammatically a mess. These are paraphrases, not exact quotes. So, the quotations mark are probably wrong. I'm probably stringing them together wrong. I just don't know how to structure this sentence properly. Maybe I should split it into multiple sentences somehow? Maybe I shouldn't paraphrase at all and structure it in a different tense?

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

  

Top answer

Because you said 'questions like', your wording in quotes is fine. The only change I would suggest to make your sentence more natural is to use Simple Past tense insetad of 'would'. ie During these online discussions, I fielded many questions from people building their own widgets.

  • Because you said 'questions like', your wording in quotes is fine.
  • The only change I would suggest to make your sentence more natural is to use Simple Past tense insetad of 'would'.
  • ie During these online discussions, I fielded many questions from people building their own widgets.
  • "
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1 Answers
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Because you said 'questions like', your wording in quotes is fine.

The only change I would suggest to make your sentence more natural is to use Simple Past tense insetad of 'would'.

ie

During these online discussions, I fielded many questions from people building their own widgets.  They asked  questions like "How do I make my widget do this?", "How can I get widgets to do 

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