Reported Speech: Questions and Commands

Why This Matters

Think about how often you repeat what someone asked you, or what someone told you to do. Your mother asks where you are going. Later you tell your friend, “She asked me where I was going.” Your coach shouts, “Run!” Later you say, “He told us to run.” You do this every single day, in Hindi or your home language without even thinking.

But doing the same thing in English trips up almost every student. Why? Because a question and a command do not just get wrapped in quotes-removed. They get reshaped. The word order flips. The question mark vanishes. New little words like “if” and “to” appear from nowhere. Get one of these wrong and the sentence sounds clearly broken to an examiner.

In Unit 8 you learned to report statements (“He said that he was tired”). This unit handles the two harder kinds: questions and commands/requests. Once you can do all three, you can report anything anyone ever says. That is a skill for life — for essays, for letters, for speaking, not just for the board exam.

The Big Idea

When you report a question or a command, you are no longer asking or ordering anything yourself. You are just telling someone that a question was asked, or that an order was given. So the sentence becomes a calm statement about that question or command. That single idea explains every change: the order goes back to normal, the question mark disappears, and small joining words (“if”, “whether”, “to”) step in to hold the new sentence together.

Before we go further, let’s lock in three words you will see in every line of this unit. Getting these clear now saves a lot of confusion later.

Let’s Break It Down

We’ll go in five steps. First a quick refresher of the rules from Unit 8 (they still apply). Then wh-questions, then yes/no questions, then commands and requests, and finally how to pick the right reporting verb.

A quick recap of the rules from Unit 8

Reporting questions and commands uses all the same background rules you already met for statements. They don’t go away — they just run quietly in the background while you also do the new question/command changes on top. So let’s refresh them in one place.

Here is a reminder card of the three rules that always apply, no matter what kind of sentence you are reporting. Figure 9.1 keeps them all in one view.

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These three are the “engine” underneath everything in this unit. From here on, when we change a question or a command, watch how these three quietly happen at the same time.

Reporting WH-questions

A wh-question is a question that begins with a wh-word: what, where, when, who, whom, whose, which, why, how. (Yes, how counts as a wh-word — it acts the same way.) These questions ask for information, not just a yes or no.

To report a wh-question, do four things:

1. Change the reporting verb to asked (or enquired).
2. Keep the wh-word — it becomes the joining word between the two halves.
3. Put the words back into statement order (subject first, then verb), and drop “do/does/did”.
4. Remove the question mark, then apply the Unit 8 rules (backshift the tense, shift pronouns and time words).

Why does the question order disappear? Here is the key idea, and it is worth slowing down for. When you ask a question directly, English flips the order — “do you live”, “are you ready” — to signal “this is a question”. But once you only report that a question was asked, your sentence is no longer a question at all. It is a plain statement about a question. A statement uses normal order. So the flip is undone.

Figure 9.2 walks through a full wh-question transformation, change by change.

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Look closely at step 3 in Figure 9.2: “do” simply disappears, and the verb that was hiding behind it (“live”) now carries the tense itself (it becomes “lived”). This is exactly why a reported wh-question never contains did — the past tense has already been absorbed into the main verb.

Let’s do one slowly, start to finish.

Reporting YES/NO questions

A yes/no question is one that can be answered with just yes or no: “Are you ready?”, “Do you like tea?”, “Can she swim?” Notice these do not start with a wh-word — they start with a helping verb (are, do, can, will, has …).

This causes a small problem. In a wh-question, the wh-word (“where”, “why”) did double duty: it asked the question and it joined the two halves of the reported sentence. A yes/no question has no wh-word. So when we remove the question feeling, there is nothing left to join “She asked” to the rest of the sentence. The two halves would just bump into each other.

English fixes this by adding the word if or whether. Both mean the same thing here, and both are correct. They are the joining word that stands in for the missing wh-word. Think of “if/whether” as a placeholder that means “yes-or-no question coming”. Figure 9.3 shows this gap-filling clearly.

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So the recipe for a yes/no question is: asked + if/whether + (statement order, with all the Unit 8 changes), no question mark.

One quick caution shown in Figure 9.3: even though we add “if/whether”, we still delete the question mark and still flip “Are you” into “I was”. Adding the joining word does not let you keep the old question shape.

Reporting COMMANDS and REQUESTS

A command orders someone to do something: “Sit down.” “Open the door.” A request politely asks them to: “Please help me.” Advice suggests what is good for them: “You should rest.” In direct speech these are often short and start straight with a verb, with no visible subject (“Sit down” really means “You sit down”).

You do not report these with “that” or “if”. Instead you use a completely different shape:

reporting verb + object + “to” + base verb

For example: She said, “Sit down.” becomes She told me to sit down. Let’s unpack that shape. The reporting verb (told) says an order was given. The object (me) says who was ordered. Then “to” + base verb (to sit) carries the actual instruction.

Why does a command turn into a “to” form? Think about what an order really is — it is a verb you want someone to do. The most natural way English packs “do this action” into a calm reported sentence is the “to”-infinitive: “I want you to sit”, “I told you to sit”. So the command verb slides neatly into that slot. There is no question mark and no tense backshift on the command verb itself, because the “to”-form has no tense to shift.

There is one special case to memorise. A negative command starts with “Don’t”: “Don’t be late.” To report it, “Don’t” becomes “not to”: She told me not to be late. The little word “not” goes in front of “to”. Figure 9.4 shows both a normal command and a “Don’t” command side by side.

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Let’s report a request all the way through.

Choosing the right reporting verb for the tone

Notice that in the last example we did not just write “He said”. We wrote “He requested”. The reporting verb is your chance to capture how something was said — and the exam rewards picking the one that fits.

Here is a simple way to choose. Match the tone of the original words to the verb:

• A harsh, forceful order (“Get out!”) becomes ordered.
• A polite request, often with “please” (“Please help me”) becomes requested.
• Advice, often with “should” (“You should rest”) becomes advised.
• A question (“Who are you?”) becomes asked.
• A plain, neutral command (“Sit down”) becomes told.

Figure 9.5 puts these matches on one chooser card you can picture during the exam.

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A handy memory aid from Figure 9.5: the signal word in the sentence often hands you the verb. See “please” → use requested. See “should” → use advised. See a wh-word or a helping verb at the start → it’s a question → use asked.

Common Mistakes

These four mistakes are the ones examiners see again and again. Each one comes from a habit that feels natural — which is exactly why it’s a trap. Read each one and notice the pull before you read the fix.

The first mistake is the most common of all: keeping the question’s flipped word order.

Closely related is forgetting to delete the question mark.

The third trap is letting “did” sneak into a reported question.

The last one is about commands — using “that” instead of the “to” form.

Quick Check

Let’s see if the rules have stuck. Try each question yourself before opening the explanation.

The next one is a yes/no question — watch for the joining word.

Now a command. Pick the right shape and the right reporting verb.

Practice Problems

Time to write full transformations yourself. Attempt each one on paper first, then reveal the model answer. Remember: every answer also quietly applies the Unit 8 rules (tense, pronouns, time words).

Easy

Start with one clean wh-question and one clean command.

Medium

Now mix in a yes/no question, a request, and a piece of advice — each needs the right joining word or reporting verb.

Challenge

These two pack in several changes at once — read carefully and apply every rule.

Summary

Here is the whole unit on one page. You should now be able to explain each of these:

• Reporting a question or command turns it into a statement about that question or command — which is why the question order and the question mark disappear.
• Wh-questions: use asked, keep the wh-word as the link, change to statement order, drop do/does/did, remove the ?.
• Yes/no questions: use asked + if/whether (the joining word that replaces the missing wh-word), statement order, no ?.
• Commands, requests and advice: use reporting verb + object + “to” + base verb. “Don’t …” becomes “not to …”.
• Choose the reporting verb by tone: order → ordered, please → requested, advice/should → advised, question → asked, plain command → told.
• The Unit 8 rules still run underneath everything: backshift the tense, shift the pronouns, shift the time and place words.

What’s Next

And with that, you’ve reached the end of Words and Expressions II. Take a moment — you’ve worked through the whole grammar and vocabulary course for Class 10: tenses, voice, modals, connectors, vocabulary, dialogue, and across the last two units, the complete picture of reported speech. That is real, lasting skill.

Here is the thing to remember: grammar is not a separate subject you finish and forget. It is the tool you use everywhere else. When you read First Flight and Footprints Without Feet, you’ll now notice how the writers report what characters say, why a sentence is in the passive, how tenses carry the timeline of a story. When you write an answer, a letter, a story or an essay in the exam, these rules are what make your English clear and correct instead of “almost right”.

So treat this as a beginning, not an ending. Go back to a story you’ve read and try reporting a line of its dialogue. Read a newspaper headline and turn it into reported speech in your head. The more you use these rules in real reading and writing, the more they become second nature — until one day you stop thinking about them and just write correct English without trying. That is the whole goal. You’ve got everything you need now. Go and use it.