Direct and indirect speech

There are two ways of narrating the spoken-words of a person. The two ways are written as follow:

1. Direct Speech
2. Indirect Speech

These two ways are also used to simply narrate spoken-words of one person to another. For example, you meet your friend, Mr. Ali, in a market. Mr. Ali says to you, "I bought apples for you". When you come home, you may say the word or Mr. Ali to your brother into the following way.

Direct Speech: Mr. Ali said, "I bought apples for you"

Indirect Speech: Mr. Ali said that he had bought apples for me.

In Direct Speech we quote actual message in inverted commas without any change.

For Example:

Ali Said: "I am sick"

In Indirect Speech we manipulate the speech according to understanding of audience,

we do not use inverted commas or in other words we actually define the quoted words. The pronouns of the sentence are also changed accordingly.

For Example:

Ali said that he was sick.

Converting Direct speech into Indirect Speech:

Before learning the rules of converting Direct into Indirect speech, you must learn the following two components of a sentence of a Direct Speech.

Reported speech and Reporting verb.

What is the difference between reported and reporting speech?

Reporting Verb is the verb of the first sentence (i.e. she said, he said, she says, they said, they say etc.) before the actual words of the speaker.

Reported speech is the second sentence that is enclosed in Inverted commas or Quotation marks.

For Example:

Ali said, "I am sick."

The bold part is reporting speech (and)

the italic part is reported speech.

It gets more simple when we know the Rules for Direct and Indirect Speech.