Direct and Indirect Speech in English | Narration Change/Rules | Six Step Formula (part2)
What is Narration?. Narration is the act of reporting the words of speaker. i.e, how you are representing the way a person has spoke. There are two main ways of reporting the words of speaker. 1. Direct Speech 2. Indirect Speech Six steps to convert a direct speech to Indirect Speech for Statements or Simple Sentences. 1.) Identify. This is the most important step. You need to identify five things here. Subject, Object, Reporting Verb, First Person, Second Person and Third Person in Reported Speech, and if the reporting Verb is in past form, then Tense of Reported Speech and any time related words in reported speech. 2.) Change of Reporting Verb, Reporting Verb will change in following way. said to will be converted to told said will be converted to said say to will be converted to tell says to will be converted to tells 3.) Replace inverted commas with that We will remove the comma and inverted commas in the sentence and join the reported speech with 'that' 4.) Change of Pronoun Pronouns that we identified in first step in the reported speech will change as below. 1st person will be as per Subject 2nd person will be as per object 3rd person will remain unchanged. You can remember this change with an acronym. S.O.N. Please remember the change of pronouns properly. 5.) Change of Tense It will happen when the reporting verb is in past form and the reported speech is not a universal truth or habit. It will happen in following way. simple present : simple past present continuous : past continuous present perfect : past perfect present perfect continuous : past perfect continuous simple past : past perfect past continuous : past perfect continuous past perfect : no change past perfect continuous : no change For Future tenses. will/shall will be replaced by would or should. And for modal verbs. can/may, it will be converted to could/ might. 6.) Change in time words. Words indicating nearness are changed into words showing distance. If this words are present and RV verb is in past tense then, the change will happen in this way. Here-there tomorrow-the next/following day This-that yesterday-the previous day These-those the next week-the following week Today-that day now-then Tonight-that night
