Interrogative sentences by changing word order

You can also swap around words in a sentence to make it an interrogative sentence. When there’s an auxiliary verb in the sentence like ‘is’, it’s shifted to the start of the sentence. Here’s a declarative sentence:

The auxiliary verb is ‘was’. By moving it to the start of the sentence we create a question:

Was the dinosaur sleeping?

Sometimes you won’t have an auxiliary verb, but just a normal verb by itself, like in this sentence:

The dinosaur slept.

To turn this into a question, you need to do two things:

Change the verb so that it has some form of the verb ‘to do’ in front of it, but still means the same thing.
Shift whatever form of the ‘to do’ verb you’ve got to the start of the sentence.

So, following Step 1, we want to put some form of the verb ‘to do’ in front of our verb ‘slept’. The verb ‘slept’ is in the past perfect tense, so we need an appropriate version of the ‘to do’ verb:

The dinosaur did sleep.

Step 2 involves moving the ‘did’ to the start of the sentence:

Did the dinosaur sleep?

Here’s the whole process for another sentence:

Michael hits the ball.

This is in the present tense, so we need to keep it that way using some form of the verb ‘to do’:

Michael does hit the ball.

Notice how it’s still in the present tense. Now we move the ‘does’ to the start of the sentence:

Does Michael hit the ball?

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