 Let's begin our examination of backshifting our words by looking at our places. Imagine for a moment I have a friend named Mike, and Mike has moved to London. I've asked Mike what he thinks of London, and his direct quote is, I love it here. However, I'm going to report Mike's speech to a mutual friend in New York. He wouldn't make much sense to say, Mike loved it here. I'm in New York, but we're talking about London. So we change here to there. The result is, Mike told me that he loved it there. Another of the changes that need to be made in reported speech have to do with the pronouns used. Again, let's look at our sentence. Mike said, I love it here. If I'm reporting what Mike said, it wouldn't make much sense for me to keep I as I, as I'm reporting my friend's speech. So I make the appropriate pronoun change from I to he. Other common pronoun changes would be we to they, so on and so forth. One of the main issues that we have to keep in consideration when reporting speech is that we want to indicate that the original speech was said in the past. The way we do that is to back shift the tense. So take again our original statement. Mike said, I love it here. Not only do I need to switch here to there, because now I'm in New York, I also have to indicate that it was said in the past. So I changed love to loved. Now it ends up with a sentence being, Mike told me he loved it there. I can no longer assume that it's true because I don't know whether Mike still loves London or not. I simply want to report what he said in the past.