Grade 9 Grammar Lesson 39 Reported speech 1

What is the direct speech?
What is the indirect speech?
What is the difference between ‘say’ and ‘tell’?
What are reporting verbs? What do they do?

When we want to say what somebody said, we use reported speech, also called Indirect speech.

We can report what somebody said in two ways:

• We can repeat the speaker’s words (example above).
• We can use our own words (Indirect speech).

We use tell when we mention the listener. We use say when we don’t mention the listener.

When we report somebody’s statement, we usually use a past reporting verb like ‘said, told, was/were telling etc’ with a connective that. But that is optional and we may omit it.

Note: When the reporting verb is in the past, the verb in the report also changes to the past forms.

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