indirect question

Definition:

A sentence that reports a question and ends with a period rather than a question mark. Contrast with Direct Question.

Examples and Observations:

• "Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."
  (Flannery O'Connor)



• "When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, 'Well, what do you need?'"
  (Steven Wright)



• "I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult."
  (Rita Rudner)



• "Indirect questions do not close with a question mark but with a period. Like direct questions they demand a response, but they are expressed as declarations without the formal characteristics of a question. That is, they have no inversion, no interrogative words, and no special intonation. We can imagine, for example, a situation in which one person asks another, 'Are you going downtown?' (a direct question). The person addressed does not hear and a bystander says, 'He asked if you were going downtown.' That is an indirect question. It requires an answer, but it is expressed as a statement and so is closed by a period, not a query."
  (Thomas S. Kane, The New Oxford Guide to Writing, Oxford University Press, 1988)



• The process of transforming [a] direct question into an indirect question is fourfold:
  1. Eliminate the punctuation: quotation marks, question marks, and comma before the question. End the whole sentence with a period.
  2. Insert the word if or whether before the question. Or, if the original question already contains a subordinator, retain it. . . .
  3. Adjust all necessary tenses and pronouns.
  4. Invert the subject and verb in the question back to normal sentence order--first subject, then verb.
  (Andrea B. Geffner, Business English, Barron's Educational Series, 2004)

Also Known As: indirect interrogatives