Reported Questions, Requests, and Orders

During the meetings of the English Grammar Club at Window on America in Kherson, we spend as much time as it is necessary for our visitors to study difficult grammatical topics. That’s why we devoted the next meeting to reported questions, requests, and orders. We mean the cases when we tell someone what another person asked. To do this, we can use direct speech or indirect speech.

Direct speech: Do you like visiting libraries? he asked.

Indirect speech: He asked me if I liked visiting libraries.

In indirect speech, we change the question to a statement structure. The most common structure is: ask + if/whether + clause. Besides ask we can also use verbs like enquire, want to know, or wonder.

Participants did exercises and practiced using this type of clause for an hour, but we learned to do it right.