DIRECT AND INDIRECT SPEECH

                          

We often have to give information about what people say or think. To do this you can use direct or quoted speech, or indirect or reported speech.





Saying exactly what someone has said is called direct speech or quoted speech.
What a person says appears within quotation marks ("...").

For example:

She said, "Today's lesson is on presentations."

or

"Today's lesson is on presentations", she said.

or

"Today's lesson is on presentations", said she.





Indirect speech, also called reported speech, doesn't use quotation marks to explain what the person said and it doesn't have to be word by word.

When you use reported speech the tense usually changes. This is because when we use reported speech, we are usually talking about a time in the past (because the person who spoke originally did it in a different time than now). So, the verbs usually have to be in past tenses, too.

For example:

Direct Speech                       Indirect Speech
"I'm going to the cinema,"     He said he was going to the 
he said.                                  cinema.

CONTINUE LEARNING REPORTED SPEECH WITH ME!

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