I have a problem about how to use the term "What about".
Is the following question grammatically correct:
" What about occupation of Wu Zetian ? "
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1Note that in English we do not put a space after an opening quotation mark or before other marks of punctuation.– StoneyB on hiatusCommented Nov 5, 2014 at 19:36
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3 Answers
Not really. If you want to ask about the occupation, it would probably be:
What about the occupation of Wu Zetian?
Perhaps followed by:
Do we know what it is? (like in an investigation or something)
It would probably be better to ask:
What is the occupation of Wu Zetian?
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Actually I am a master student of computer science and in my thesis we are designing a question generation system, we are provided by some names and we do not know if they are alive or not.– SinaCommented Nov 5, 2014 at 20:03
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Ah. Artificial Intelligence and NLP? :). I think the questions would be the same though. If you want to convey the possibility that the person never existed, you could say: "What would be the occupation of Wu Zetian?" or "What would have been...". If you want to convey the possibility that the person is dead, you could say "What was the occupation of Wu Zetian?". Commented Nov 5, 2014 at 20:07
It is OK, with a minor correction:
What about the occupation of Wu Zetian?
or you could say:
How about the occupation of Wu Zetian?
These are informal usages and more likely in spoken conversation. More correct and the actual meaning could be written as:
What do you think about the occupation of Wu Zetian?
Seeing that the other posts focused on how to grammatically tweak that sentence, I wanted to address when the term is used. In my experience, people use "What about" as a follow up question. You ask a question about one noun and then you want to ask the same question about a second noun. The phrase "What about..." is used to imply the prior question.
What is Todd's occupation? What about Jim's?
What color is your room? What about his room?
In fact, the question in the other answers:
What about the occupation of Wu Zetian?
could be interpreted many different ways if it is the lead question. If you're just looking for occupation name, it's quite likely you'll get more detail than you want.
