Reported speech is used to say what someone else has said. Use it to pass on what has been said at a different time. In other words, reported speech is used to report. Sometimes reported speech is called indirect speech.

He said he was going to do it tomorrow. 

Learn more about the reasons for reported speech

How to make Reported Speech

There are two things you must do when reporting speech:

1. Change the tense of what is said;
2. Change relative words like pronouns (I, you, she ...etc) and "this" or "that", "here" or "there", "yesterday" and "tomorrow" and so on.

1. Changing Tense

Reported speech is always something that happened in the past. And so when you report a person's speech, you almost always start with "Billy said ..." or something similar. But you also have to change the tense of what the person said, one step into the past.

Let's look at some examples:

2. Changing Relative Words

Because the speakers point of view changes, some words will change when you report speech. Be careful! This point is very important. If you make a mistake with this, then listeners don't know who is doing what you are talking about. How you change the word depends on the change in relation between the reporter and the original speaker. Look the examples in the table:

Let's look at some examples: