“Reported Speech”
Suppose you say to somebody, “I can’t be bothered, as I am busy writing a précis!” you are using a form which is called Direct speech. And suppose the person you were addressing goes away and says to somebody else, “So-and-so said he couldn’t be bothered, as he was busy writing a précis”, he is reporting what you said. In other words, he has turned your ‘direct speech’ into ‘reported speech’.
Notice what has happened. You are no longer the person speaking, but the person spoken about: therefore ‘I’ becomes ‘he’. Also you are no longer speaking: what you said is now ‘in the past’; therefore ‘can’t’ becomes ‘could not’ and ‘am’ becomes ‘was’.
This is quite straightforward. The difficulty arises when you are dealing with words that imply future time. Without going into the syntax, one may just explain that in Reported speech the ‘future’ must be referred back to the time at which the Direct statement was spoken. Thus: “I will write when I get home”, becomes “He said that he would write when he got home”.
Thus for the purposes of simple précis writing the following rules must be observed:—
(a) Never use the First or Second persons: always the Third.
(b) Never use the Present tense: always the Past.
(c) Never use the Future tense: always refer it back to the past. Even a verb such as ‘must’, which usually implies the future, should be changed to ‘would have to’, or some such phrase.
(d) Possessive adjectives, my, your, our, must be changed to the Third person.
(e) Adverbs and adverbial phrases must be changed in the same way. ‘Now’ becomes ‘then’; ‘at the present time’ becomes ‘at that time’; ‘here’ becomes ‘there’, and so on.
Take one more example. You know this familiar quotation: “I will arise and go to my Father, and say unto Him, ‘Father, I have sinned against Heaven and before Thee, and am no more worthy to be called Thy son’”.
Now suppose you were telling the story of the Prodigal Son to a Japanese gentleman, or somebody who had not heard it before, and you wished to keep pretty close to the original, you might put it in this way: “The prodigal son then determined that he would arise and go to his Father, and confess that he had sinned before Him and against Heaven, and was no more worthy to be called His son”.
Compare these two forms, and note all the differences.