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There are four things you need to do to change direct speech to reported speech.
First, you need to remove the quotation marks.
Second, without the quotation marks, you need to make sure that your pronouns are clear. For example, when President Kennedy says, "we shall pay any price," "we" actually means the country of the United States. Once we take away the quotation marks, "we" is no longer clear since it sounds like he is talking about you and me. One choice is to use "The United States" instead of "we." We could write:
President Kennedy said that the United States would pay any price.
Third, direct speech becomes a noun clause when changed to reported speech. If we look at the grammar, we can understand why.
President Kennedy said something.
In this sentence, "something" is the object of the verb, "said." If we want to use a whole sentence instead of the single word "something," we need to use a noun clause.
If you look at the example again, you can see that we used "that" because it is a statement noun clause.
President Kennedy said that the United States would pay any price.
Fourth, verbs often need to change when using reported speech. When we use reported speech, we are usually describing something that someone said in the past. We see this because we use the past tense for the speaking verb, in this case, "said."
This means that the other verbs in the direct speech shift into the past tense, too. In this example, the future verb, "shall pay," becomes "would pay."
President Kennedy said that the United States would pay any price.
What is a Noun Clause?
How to form a Noun Clause
When to use a Noun Clause
Reported or Quoted Speech
Samples of Noun Clause usage
Final Unit Exercise
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