Indirect quotations report what someone said without using their exact words and without quotation marks. When converting direct speech to reported speech, the tense of the verb typically shifts back one tense ('I love this book' becomes 'He said that he loves this book' or 'He said that he loved this book'). Personal pronouns also change to reflect the new speaker (I → he/she, you → I, we → they). Reported speech sounds more formal and is used when exact wording is not important.
From your study of direct quotations, you know how to reproduce someone's exact words inside quotation marks: She said, "I'm leaving tomorrow." Reported speech (also called indirect quotation) does something different: instead of displaying the words, you summarize them and integrate them into your own sentence. She said she was leaving the next day. No quotation marks, no colon — just a that-clause embedded in the reporting sentence. The meaning is preserved but the form changes, and the changes follow predictable rules.
The most important rule is tense backshift. When the reporting verb ("said," "told," "explained") is in the past tense, the verb inside the reported clause typically shifts one step further into the past. Present simple ("I love this") becomes past simple ("he said he loved that"). Past simple ("I left early") becomes past perfect ("she said she had left early"). This backshift makes sense if you think of it as a time gap: you are now reporting something that was said at an earlier moment, so the perspective shifts. If the information reported is still currently true, the shift is optional: "She said she is a doctor" and "She said she was a doctor" are both acceptable.
Pronoun reference also shifts to reflect the new speaker's perspective. The original speaker's "I" becomes "he" or "she" in third-person reporting; "you" changes to "I" or "they" depending on who was being addressed; "we" often becomes "they." Demonstratives shift too: "this" becomes "that," "here" becomes "there," and time expressions like "now" become "then," "today" becomes "that day," and "tomorrow" becomes "the following day." All of these changes anchor the reported content to the reporter's here-and-now rather than the original speaker's.
Reported speech also handles questions and commands, not just statements. A direct question ("Are you ready?") becomes an indirect question using whether or a wh-word: "She asked whether I was ready." Notice the word order reverts to normal statement order — no inversion, no question mark. A direct command ("Sit down!") becomes an infinitive construction: "He told me to sit down." Mastering these patterns matters most in formal writing, journalism, and academic contexts where you frequently need to attribute ideas to others while integrating them smoothly into your own prose.