Reporting speech - an introduction
Welcome back Marcos!
I’m sorry to hear that you have had to work hard over the Easter holiday (and VERY sorry about the photo of my Mum’s cake!!!) but happy that your report is finished and you can relax a bit.
Thanks for the information about the variety of ways of celebrating Easter in Brazil. There is some interesting information about other religious festivals in the comments too.
In this post, I’m going to make some basic points about the reporting of direct and indirect speech in writing. Apologies if there is nothing new for you; I’ll go into more detail in future posts. I will also give the answers to the red sky at night multi-word verb gap fill task, as well as answering a couple of questions asked by the blog readers.
In this section, I’ll use our Easter Day conversation about the cake (see my previous post for a complete script of the conversation) to create examples of direct and indirect speech. OK, the way that we report our own or other peoples’ speech in writing can be either direct (when we recreate the exact words the original speaker used, including the same pronouns and verb forms) or indirect (when we don’t try to recreate the exact words spoken, and use different pronouns and verb forms as a way of showing the relationship between now and the original moment of speaking).
Direct speech: Rachel pointed to the marzipan balls on the Easter cake and asked, “What are these things for?”
Indirect speech: Rachel pointed to the marzipan balls on the Easter cake and asked what they represented.
In direct speech, there are two clauses; the reporting clause (Rachel….asked,) and the reported clause (“What are these things for?”). The reported clause is separated from the reporting clause by a comma (usually) and speech marks (either single or double inverted commas).
In indirect speech, there is a reporting clause (Rachel…..asked) and a reported clause which is more fully integrated as the object of the reporting verb and which is usually not separated by punctuation.
I’ll come back to some of these points in future posts to add more detail and give some more examples…
Well done to the blog readers who answered the MWV gap fill task (including Ana Paula, Cheikh Vall, Adek, Toni, Daria and Hyoshil). Cheikh Vall, you were the only person to get all the answers correct, so extra well done to you! The MWV that provided the most problems was make out, which in this context means distinguish, discern or see (with difficulty).
Here is the complete text:
I don’t know if the camera will pick this up, but you might be able to make out some spots of red in the sky. A traditional saying in English is, “red sky at night, shepherd’s delight”, which means that we can look forward to nice weather tomorrow when the sunset is reddish in colour. The saying continues, “red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning”, which means that we are going to have to put up with rain. I suppose that shepherds need to look out for bad weather because they can’t let their sheep out to graze if it might pour down. I’ll try and pick out the reddest part of the clouds (pause…) we don’t get this a lot, but it’s…
Have you tried using online visual dictionaries/thesauri? Here’s a good one (you should be able to see make out as an example – but beware, make out also means kiss passionately and there are some taboo, in some situations, words in this visual definition!).
Visuwords – make out
More on reporting speech later….
Don’t work too hard Marcos!
Rachel
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Comments on the comments:
James (from Taiwan): Celsius and Centigrade are two names for the same temperature scale (which was invented by Anders Celsius).
Hyoshil (from the UK): Thanks for remembering that my Dad was exploring our family history! He’s still doing it and has got back to the early 1700’s, and found relatives in Canada and Australia. A few generations of his father’s family made wheels, while on his mother’s side there were several generations of printers.
This map only has limited coverage, but you can see how often your surname (family name) occurs in certain countries – try it!
World Names Profiler
Comments
Hi Rachel! I loved the Visuwords. Thanks for telling us about it :-). Well, it´s pretty late here so I´m going to hit the sack. Good night, Ana Paula.
Hello Rachel! Just today I´ve taken a time for re-reading all your post again from hard copies. As ever, it is too difficult for me to deal with formal grammar explanations even harder to cope with it from the screen only. I am used on the oldfashioned style and to learn from reading these ordinary days reports is the best way for me. You´ve used ´hope´ in present continuous form which I´ve thought it is imposible to use ´ing´ form of hope, but it is really logical use there, for you was hoping just for that day.. I liked the description of your reading style too. As a tenage visitor of the local library I found the small book written by the slovak medical doctor about his work in Indonesia studying and fighting against malaria there. The book was very interesting. Later on, not allowed to study art by my parents I became a medical doctor and worked in microbiology labs over twenty years. I don´t use many MWVs and every time I open the English dictionary I am so scared from lots possibilities there I don´t have patience to look for the meanings there. It always come the feeling I am at the beginning with this language. I am hoping this won´t disturb you in pointing on right ways in our learning. Greetings to all participants you have around!
Hi Rachel, I found that visuword very interesting. I've already added the site to my bookmark list. I'm following the lessons about the reported speech and I'm learning a lot. Thank you for your great help. See you soon, bye.
Hello,Rachel.You have said you going in details of the direct and indirect reporting in the coming entries. Would you ,then,give us some exercises to be re-writed from a style to an other.Thank you for the time you spent correcting my writing.You realy made my day when i found out that my answers were all right.And thank you for the two sites you directed us to.
Hi Rachel! As usual, thanks for your videos. That cake seemed very appetizing. Did you eat something special for Easter? I am referring to the other courses. Thanks for your explanations and yes, I use some online dictionaries. I find them very useful!! I advise Babylon too. Have a good week-end!!!
Hi Rachel! How fascinating to hear that your father has managed to trace his family roots back as early as 1700’s, and found relatives in Canada and Australia. I wish your dad the best of luck discovering the rest of his family roots and history. I’ve tried world Names Profiler, and learned that my husband’s surname is very popular in Australia, Canada and United States. So, we guess one of his relatives was maybe a convict and transported to Australia. It will be so stimulating if we start tracing my husband’s family history. I’ve been following your grammar explanations and it has been much easier for me understanding some complex area of English. Thank you for the website, and I am looking forward to the next lesson.xx
Hi Rachel, Wow, it is amazing to find out about previous generations and their names. It appears to be very tiresome work to do. I guess if one is motivated to do something than every thing is possible. Even though I would love to know about my previous generations but I wouldn't have the courage to do something like this. May be in the future if I am healthy and have time, I will difinitely try to find out about my early generations. Just wondering, how it is possible to trace your family history since there was no concept of birth certificates or death certificates previously. Also education was not common during those days and I believe that information about ordinary people would not be stored. Another important factor is computer. Since computer were not invented or not commonly used, how is it possible to trace your family roots as far as 1700. Anyway, I am fascinated by your father's hard work. Good luck to your father in the future. Best wishes Rabail UK
Hi Rachel, In one of her comment Filippo mentioned online dictionary. Would it be possible for you to give me some information about online dictionaries as I am mostly on computer and it will be very useful for me to check difficult words online. Recently, I tried 7-days free babylon online dictionary and I found it very helpful but as it was only for 7 days, it expired soon. Would you know how much it would cost? I will greatly appreciate it if you give me some information regarding this online dictionaries. Best wishes Rabail
Hello, Rachel! You must be enjoying your job, teaching and working with a multicultural class. Do they study to be the teachers of English when they get back to their countries? I don’t understand what are those varieties of English. Would you give us some short pieces of writings in some of those varieties, please? But, I think that the pronunciation has an important role in determining to which variety a language belongs. On some pages on the internet I could choose to see the text written in International English, opposed to British English. I always chose British English because I wanted to learn good English. I did not want to be baffled when reading strange words which should be English. Now that I have started reading your blog, I regret not having read at least one of the texts written in International English just to quench my curiosity and see what they look like and how the language differs from British English. I hope you haven’t forgotten about those videos you promised , I’m expecting more of them. Benka from Serbia
Thanks for all your contributions. This blog has now closed and can no longer accept new comments.
