Thus He told her, You are in danger may be kept, but is usually altered to He told her that she was in danger, or to He told her she was in danger. In the first, You are in danger is not properly a subordinate clause, but a sentence, which may be said to be in apposition with these words understood. In the second and third alike, the altered words are a subordinate substantival clause, the object to told. It follows that when the actual words are given as such (this is sometimes only to be known by the tone: compare I tell you, I will come, and I tell you I will come), a comma should be inserted; whereas, when they are meant as mere reported or indirect speech, it should be omitted. Actual words given as such should also be begun with a capital letter; and if they consist of a compound sentence, or of several sentences, a comma will not suffice for their introduction; a colon, a colon and dash, or a full stop, with quotation marks always in the last case, and usually in the others, will be necessary; but these are distinctions that need not be considered here in detail.
Further, it must be remembered that substantival clauses include indirect questions as well as indirect statements, and that the same rules will apply to them. The two following examples are very badly stopped:
(a) Add to all this that he died in his thirty-seventh year: and then ask, if it be strange that his poems are imperfect?–Carlyle.
Accommodation of the stops to the words would give:
and then ask if it be strange that his poems are imperfect.
And accommodation of the words to the stops would give:
and then ask, Is it strange that his poems are imperfect?
(b) It may be asked can further depreciation be afforded.–Times.
The two correct alternatives here are similarly:
It may be asked, Can further depreciation be afforded?
It may be asked whether further depreciation can be afforded.
As the sentences stood originally, we get in the Carlyle a most theatrical, and in the Times a most slovenly effect.
