By Direct questions, Word order

'The committee has met to determine how effective the newsletter is for raising awareness within the division.' This is a relative clause, the object of the verb 'determine'; as such, it assumes the normal S-V sentence word order. Or, you can think of it as an indirect question: the 'original'...

I agree with Lib--when the subject of your sentence is actually the interrogative pronoun, you don't change the word order. For example: "What does it mean?" "What does it mean?" is the direct question, "Do you know what it means?" is the indirect question. You invert the word order because...

Thanks that does help somewhat but I'm sorry to say I'm not entirely satisfied in that I do not want to tell my student that the word order of an indirect question is dependent on the manner in which its answer is oriented to it. This will only confuse her. After all it's possible to answer the...