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Introduction:Using Indirect SpeechIntroduction/Warm-Up
Read these two jokes.
After seeing a movie, a man followed a woman out of the movie theater. She had a dog on a leash. He stopped her and said, “I’m sorry to bother you, but I couldn’t help notice that your dog was watching the movie really closely. He cried at the right times, he moved nervously in his seat during the boring parts, but most amazingly of all, he laughed at the funny parts. Did you find that unusual?” "Yes," replied the woman. “I found it very unusual because he hated the book!”
A three-year-old boy went with her father to see a new litter of kittens. When they got home, the little girl excitedly informed her mother that there had been two boy kittens and one girl kitten. Her mother asked her how she had known that. The girl replied that her father had picked the kittens up and looked underneath. She said that she thought it was printed on the bottom.
Animal jokes are always popular in English, but these two jokes are told using different grammatical forms. In “Clever Dog” we use direct quotes to tell what the characters in the joke said. In “Kittens,” however, indirect speech is used to report what the characters said.
A joke is usually more successful if you tell it using direct speech, but we use indirect speech more when we are telling someone a story about something that happened to us or when we want to report what another person said.
Let’s learn more about using indirect speech.
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