‘‘For GCSE we’re studying ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘Far from
the Madding Crowd’ and ‘Anthology of War Poems’,’’
Peter told his mother.Notice that each title is enclosed in inverted commas. In the
first example single inverted commas have been used for
the direct speech and double for the title. In the second
example it is the other way round. Nowadays publishers
usually use single inverted commas for direct speech and
quotations and titles apear in italics.
Changing to indirect speech
Sometimes you may wish to ‘report’ what someone has said
rather than quote the actual words. This is calledindirect
speech or ‘reported speech’ and no inverted commas are
needed. In the following example the direct speech has been
changed to indirect.
Direct speech: ‘I am going to London,’ she said.
Indirect speech: She said that she was going to London.
The conjunction ‘that’ has been added and the first person ‘I’
has been changed to the third person ‘she’. All pronouns and
possessive adjectives must also be changed into the third
person when writing indirect speech. The tense has been
changed from the present to the past.
In all cases of indirect speech there must be a ‘saying’ verb
followed by ‘that’. (Sometimes ‘that’ can be omitted and
‘understood’.) The tense of the ‘saying’ verb determines the
tense of the verbs that follow it. In the previous example
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