Using Indirect Speech

Lecture 1: Identifying Direct and Indirect Speech   Direct Speech   An Abstract Noun   One day a teacher was teaching her class about grammar. The teacher said, “An abstract noun is something you can think of, but you can't touch it. Can you give me an example of one?"  "Sure," a teenage boy replied. "My father's new car."       In English, when you tell jokes like this one, you can use direct speech to quote the exact words that a person says in the story. Here are two examples of direct speech from the above joke:   The teacher said, “An abstract noun is something you can think of, but you can't touch it. Can you give me an example of one?" "Sure," a teenage boy replied. "My father's new car."   A speaker or writer uses direct speech to tell the listener or reader the exact words that another person said. You can recognize direct speech because it has “quotation marks” around it. Let’s look again at the direct speech quoted from the teacher in our joke:   The teacher said, “An abstract noun is something you can think of, but you can't touch it. Can you give me an example of one?"   Do you see the quotation marks (“”) before the first word in the quote (An) and after the last word in the quote (one)? You should also notice that we use a comma between the quote and the rest of the sentence.       Indirect Speech There’s another way to report what another person said, however. Let’s look at another joke:       True-False   A young child was in school taking a true-false test. For every question he flipped a coin. At the end of the test he flipped the coin again. The teacher asked, “What are you doing?”   He replied, “I’m checking my answers.”     This joke also uses direct speech to express the words of the teacher and the young student. We could communicate the same ideas, however, by using indirect (or reported) speech. Here’s what that would look like:   True-False   A young child was in school taking a true-false test. At every question he flipped a coin. At the end of the test he flipped the coin again. The teacher asked what he was doing.   He replied that he was checking his answers.   Direct Speech: The teacher asked, “What are you doing?” Indirect Speech: The teacher asked what he was doing.   Direct Speech: He replied, “I’m checking my answers.” Indirect Speech: He replied that he was checking his answers.   Now that you know that you have these two options to choose from when telling a story, it’s important to know when to use them. Direct speech is mostly used in jokes, books and plays. Most people use indirect speech to tell a story from their personal experience or to report what someone else said.