Aug 29, 2011

Question words in non-questions

Often, we use question words like how or why in sentences that are not questions. When we do this, it's easy to make a mistake and maintain the same word order we use for questions. Here are some examples of the difference:

How did we do it?

They want to know how we did it.

Why am I here?

I don't know why I'm here.

Where are you?

I'm asking where you are.

What is it?

I want to know what it is.

You can see that in these sentences, we have to change the word order.

Another example of this is How I Met Your Mother. The question form would be: how did I meet your mother? We often use this structure for titles, like Why You Should Eat More Ice Cream, or Where I Found The Nicest People in the World, or Why Cats Paint.

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