Reported Speech — Activity

Your friend calls and says, “I’ll be at Churchgate in ten minutes.” An hour later you tell someone, “She said she would be at Churchgate in ten minutes” — and without thinking you changed “I” to “she”, “will” to “would” and dropped the quotation marks. That instinct is reported speech. Lawyers do it all day: a witness’s words become “the witness stated that…”, and counsel’s arguments become “it was submitted that…”. The question this topic answers is how to make that shift correctly every time, so the report says exactly what the speaker meant.

In two minutes

Indirect (reported) speech gives the substance of someone’s words without quoting them: remove the quotation marks, join the clause with a linking word, and — when the reporting verb is in the past — shift tenses one step back and change pronouns and time-and-place words to fit the reporter.

The rest of this chapter

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