 Now let's just quickly review reported speech. Let's look at the example here. John said, I am happy. In reported speech this would change to John told me he was happy. Many people ask why we make these changes but let's look at this example. If we said John said he is happy it would indicate that he's happy now at the time I'm reporting what he said rather than at the time he actually said it. So the general rule is we move the verb one tense back. Here we can see I am happy is the present tense therefore moving it one tense back would change it to the past tense as we see John told me he was happy. Just as the tense needs to be changed so do other words relating to time and place. Let's look at some of the time and place words that change. Today becomes that day meaning that day when he said it now becomes then yesterday the day before the day previous last week the week before the week previous the previous week next year the following year the year after tomorrow the next day here there this would change to that as in this week to that week this year that year and these would change to those. The usage of the reported speeches as its name suggests to report what somebody else has said the main problem is in backshifting these tenses and also changing the time and place words. There are occasions when changes don't need to be made if we know the time and the place hasn't changed for example however it's never wrong to make the changes and so usually we'll encourage our students to make the changes in all cases until they gradually learn the exceptions. Here are some tips for completing your conditional and reported speech units. Again we need to focus on the sentences structure. If you're able to do this you'll be able to identify which conditional has been used as well as how to backshift the components of the reported speech. When asked to create reported speech sentences remember that the point of the exercise is to practice on the backshifting. We're not concerned here about the exceptions for when backshifting isn't necessary. Remember that it's never wrong to backshift and this is what we're looking for. When asked to create both direct and reported speech for certain expressions remember that those expressions only need to be in the direct speech and that they should accurately be backshifted for the reported speech.