Indirect/Reported Speech

Indirect speech is used to talk about what other people said. It is the opposite of direct speech.

You recognize direct speech by quotation marks:

"I really do not like rain", said Tom.

This is an example of direct speech. If you now wanted to tell your mom what Tom said, you would use indirect speech. That would look like this:

Tom said he did not like rain.

What has changed? The two most important things about indirect speech:

there are no quotation marks;
in most cases the tense of the verb changes. This is called "backshift".

But unfortunately it is not as simple as that. How exactly you have to form a sentence in reported speech depends

on the tense of the original sentence;
on what type of a sentence it was, for example a statement, a question or an order.

Apart from that you have to have a closer look at personal pronouns and time markers. They also change in reported speech.