Indirect Speech - How do you tell a story?
When you tell a story about something that happened to you, you often want to tell people what someone said. If you use indirect speech, it will be very impressive. You can even include indirect speech in your examples for the TOEFL essay. If you do it correctly, you will get a higher score because it requires more advanced grammar. So, how do you do it?
I’ll explain the three main types of indirect speech and some common mistakes to avoid.
1. Use an infinitive (to + a verb) after ask or tell. ** This is the easiest kind!
For example:
Direct speech - “Can you open the door?” or “Open the door.”
Indirect speech - She asked me to open the door. She told me to open the door.
2. For indirect questions: After the question word, put the subject + the verb in the normal order, not reversed like a direct question.
For example:
Direct speech - “Where is the bathroom?”
Indirect speech - He asked me where the bathroom was.
3. Change the verb into the past if it’s in the present or into the past perfect if it’s in the past.
For example:
Direct speech - “I love popcorn.”
Indirect speech - “She told me she loved popcorn.”
Now you go for it. Tell me a story in the comments and include something someone told or asked you!
Kim
Hi, Kim! I found your blog when I was surfing the net. I’m a 20-yearl-old girl from Argentina and I’ve learnt English since 2006. I’m in 3rd year now! I think this blog is very useful, and I’m sure it will help me a lot! Please, keep up your work in this blog! I hope you can understand me!!
Thanks a lot!
Daniela
I liked your message here on how to do indirect speech. I wanted to add that some of my students like to think about relative clauses (we are practicing them), and the last category you have uses relative clauses without the ‘that’. So if students are comfortable with relative clauses, then have them think about that to make the reported speech. This makes it easier for some students.
This is great advice, Les. So, to clarify for all the ESL learners (to make something easier to understand), in the above example, you can say …
She told me that she loved popcorn. Or you can drop “that”. I think it’s more common to drop “that” in regular speech, but it is certainly correct if you leave it.
Hi Daniela,
I’m so glad you like the blog!
I can understand you fine - your English is excellent.
Kim