Direct And Indirect Speech - 1

Direct and Indirect Speech

There two ways to convey a message of a person, or the words spoken by a person to
other person.
1. Direct speech
2. Indirect speech
Suppose your friend whose name is John tells you in school, “I will give you a pen”. You
come to home and you want to tell your brother what your friend told you. There are two
ways to tell him.
We may report the words of a speaker in two ways:
I) We may quote his actual words. This is called Direct Speech.
ii) We may report what he said without quoting his exact words. This is called Indirect
(or Reported) Speech.
Direct: Rama said, “I am very busy now.”
Indirect: Rama said that he was very busy then.
It will be noticed that in Direct Speech, we use inverted commas to mark off the exact
words of the speaker. In Indirect Speech we do not.
It will be further noticed that in changing the above Direct Speech into Indirect certain
changes have been made.
Thus,
i) We have used the conjunction ‘that’ before the Indirect statement.
ii) The pronoun ‘I’ is changed to ‘he’. (The Pronoun is changed in Person.)
iii) The verb ‘am’ is changed to ‘was’. (Present Tense is changed to Past.)
iv) The adverb ‘now’ is changed to ‘then’.