Both terms describe a way of recounting something that may have been said – but there is a subtle difference between them.
Direct speech describes when something is being repeated exactly as it was – usually in between a pair of inverted commas. For example:
She told me, “I’ll come home by 10pm.”
Indirect speech will still share the same information – but instead of expressing someone’s comments or speech by directly repeating them, it involves reporting or describing what was said. An obvious difference is that with indirect speech, you won’t use inverted commas. For example:
She said to me that she would come home by 10pm.
Direct speech can be used in virtually every tense in English.
Indirect speech is used to report what someone may have said, and so it is always used in the past tense. Instead of using inverted commas, we can show that someone’s speech is being described by using the word “that” to introduce the statement first.
