Direct and indirect speech rules, examples, and exercises. Check active and passive voice vs direct and indirect speech. How ...

For indirect speech, inverted commas are not used and the sentences are written in the third form, referring to the third person. For example: Ram said that he was working on the project at that time.

Past perfect remains past perfect Like should / might / could in the earlier examples, the past perfect used in direct speech cannot move one tense further back in indirect speech: 'If only I had ...

Indirect speech: Davido said he didn’t want any controversy now. You would think that I did well by ensuring that I changed the tenses of the verbs in the statements in the direct speech, while ...

Whether it is in direct speech or the indirect, punctuation marks such as the comma, full stop and question mark should be diligently and carefully handled to avoid confusion or outright errors.