Indirect speech conveys comments without quotation marks, providing dialogue or commentary from one person through someone else’s perspective. It is often used in fiction and allows writers to provide information about the commentator. It should not be confused with unspoken speech, which indicates thoughts.
Indirect speech is a form of expression often used in written or spoken works of fiction, as well as in everyday conversation, where a comment is conveyed indirectly by a speaker without quotation marks. The purpose is to provide dialogue or other commentary from one person through someone else’s perspective. It is often found in dialogue within a narrative or in a written work narrated by a particular individual. Writers can use indirect speech to provide information without a direct quote, which also allows the writer to provide information about the person conveying a comment.
Examples can be seen in a sentence such as “The woman wondered where she was.” In this statement, the woman is wondering something, but she is not placed in quotation marks from the sentence, just like in the sentence “That man said you are a police officer.” Both of these examples of indirect speech contrast with direct speech such as “The woman wondered, ‘Where am I?’” where the comment is a direct quotation.
The purpose of indirect speech is to provide dialogue or other commentary from one person through someone else’s perspective. It is often found in dialogue within a narrative or in a written work narrated by a particular individual. Writers can use indirect speech to provide information without a direct quote, which also allows the writer to provide information about the person conveying a comment. When a direct quote is used, it typically only provides information about the original speaker, without the additional perspective of the character conveying the information.
A simple example can be seen in a sentence like: “The man just yelled that he was hungry”. This gives insight into the speaker in this statement, who is not the man who commented that he was hungry. The speaker is conveying this information through indirect speech, which allows him to modify the original statement with the word “croaked.” This word conveys information to a reader about the commentator and not the original speaker.
In contrast to this, direct speech might be: “That man just said, ‘I’m hungry.'” This provides information about the original speaker only, as only the original information is provided with no additional information from the second speaker. Of course, this can be changed to “That man just croaked, ‘I’m hungry,'” but that could mean that the original speaker actually said it in a way that sounded like croaking. The shift from direct to indirect speech is subtle, but the extra level of communication it allows can be quite powerful.
Indirect speech should not be confused with unspoken speech, which indicates thoughts rather than spoken words. An example of unspoken speech would be: “The girl wondered, ‘Where am I?’” Unspoken speech is thought directly from a character and is often indicated by the use of quotation marks. An example of unspoken indirect speech would be “The girl was wondering where you were.” Both the quotation marks and the question mark are missing, as it’s not actually presented as a question.
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