Reported Speech: Whenever you are quoting someone else’s words, you use two kinds of speeches – Direct or Indirect speech. In this chapter, we will learn all about Direct and Indirect speech and how to convert one into another.
Whenever you report a speech there’s a reporting verb used like “say” or “tell”. For example:
Direct speech: I love to play football.
Reported speech: She said that she loves to play football. (Note 1 : Assume a gender if not mentioned already. Note 2: Using “that” is optional. This sentence could also have been written as “She said she loves to play football.”)
The tense doesn’t have to be changed in this case of reported speech. But of the reporting verb is in the past tense, we do change the tense of the sentence.