Living with cancer - indirect or reported speech

Indirect or reported speech

Hi and welcome to another great lesson with New English Academy. I’m your guide, Giles Parker, and today we’re going to look at how to use indirect speech to report or say what someone else said. There are a couple of really useful rules you need to remember when you tell someone what someone else said. For example, verb tenses change, pronouns and here-and-now-type words also change. AND you need to use a special group of verbs called reporting verbs. Phew! It’s a bit tricky and that is why this lesson doesn’t focus on how to make questions – we’ll save that for the next lesson. Our comprehension text today reports the meeting between Paola who is suffering from cancer, her district nurse Stefania and her daughter Katia. Cancer sucks and Paola, Stefania and Katia talk about what they can do to help Paola live at home and be as independent as possible. This lesson was requested by Iolanda in Brazil and is aimed at advanced level students but beginners and intermediate level students can still learn from it. You can get the full course including the interactive comprehension lesson and comprehension test, the interactive grammar and vocabulary lessons and fun online language-learning games at our website, www.newenglishacademy.com. Don’t forget to check out the free courses in the course catalogue too. Finally, let me know if there is something YOU want to study, and I’ll make a podcast and an online course for you too.

Grammar explanation

How do you tell one friend what your other friend said, or decided or thought? Well, there are two different ways to do this. You can use direct speech which uses the exact same words, like a quote, or 2) you can use indirect or reported speech.

With direct speech you say exactly what the other person said. You introduce what she said with a reporting verb such as say or tell. If you write what someone said, then you have use quotation marks or speech marks to show where the quote starts and stops. Here are a couple of examples of direct speech:

· She said, “It’s going to rain again.”

· “That’s the third time this week,” she added.

Did you notice the reporting verbs? To say and to add are reporting verbs that introduce what the person says.

But how about when you don’t want to use the speaker’s exact words, or, more importantly, when you are speaking, not writing, English? Well, this is when you use indirect speech. Indirect speech is a report, not a quote. It doesn’t use the exact same words, though it can. When you write it you don’t have to put quotation marks around the report.  You still have to introduce what the other person said with a reporting verb, and there is a free list of reporting verbs that you can download from this course on the website.

The report of what the person says becomes a noun phrase or a noun clause which is usually introduced by that. Do you remember the two examples just now where the girl talked about the rain? Here they are again as indirect speech, i.e.; now I’m reporting what she said:

· She said that it’s going to rain again.

· She added that it’s the third time this week.

Did you see where the noun phrase is? It’s going to rain is the noun phrase in the first sentence and It’s the third time this week is the noun phrase in the second sentence.

Are you still with me? OK. I mentioned earlier that things like verbs and