As a senior manager, you are constantly relaying information.
The board said this, the client mentioned that.
In this episode, we're going to focus on reported speech, so that you can translate conversations clearly, accurately and confidently.
Let's crack on.
Hello and welcome back to Confident Business English.
My name is Anna.
I'm a neuro language coach and I support senior managers like you all around the world to speak more confidently in English.
Today I've got a technical one for you.
Something that you're going to have to use every single day.
Reported speech.
If we zoom out, reported speech is just retelling what somebody else said.
And think about it, when you're at work, you rarely only speak for yourself.
Perhaps you're telling your team what the board said, or you're relaying what the client said to the rest of the team.
You're also communicating what the legal team said, HR, your team, etc.
You're using this all the time.
So, as I said before...
Reported speech is just retelling what somebody else said.
I'm sure you're familiar with that grammar topic if you've studied it in any way whatsoever.
And I just want you to think about it in two parts, a little bit like two parts of an orange or two parts of an avocado.
You've got the first half, which is the reporting clause, and the second half, which is the reported content.
For example, you could say, the manager said the deadline was unrealistic.
The manager said, reporting clause, the deadline was unrealistic, reported content.
You'll notice that sometimes we have that, sometimes we don't.
Another example with a common reporting verb could be tell.
She told me that the client had some concerns.
Or without the that, she told me the client had some concerns.
You'll notice there that difference is there's an object after tell.
And that, by far, I would say, is the most classic correction is to either not have the object after tell or to put the object after the verb say.
He said me that, for example.
Is it the end of the world? no.
Would I still understand you?
Yes.
Does it sound great?
No, not really.
It sounds a little bit clunky in English.
Is it worth correcting?
It depends if it's just an isolated correction.
I would probably say there's not a major issue, but if you're doing it every single time you say that sentence, then definitely it's worth doing, simply because it's a phrase that you're going to be using a lot.
I also want you to remember that there is another technical rule that comes with reported speech, which is about the tense in which you report what was said.
The rule is when the reporting verb is in the past, the tense usually moves back one step.
For example, if the person that you were talking to said the budget is too tight and you then told your colleague John about it, you would say he said the budget was too tight.
The present reported speech becomes past.
The past becomes the past perfect.
It jumps back a step.
However, what I would say is it's not absolutely critical that you hit that point.
You could equally say, he said the budget is too tight.
I would understand you perfectly.
It's kind of one of those technical rules that we have a little bit of flexibility with.
The reason why I'm saying that is because, even if the tense isn't perfectly shifted, the message is still clear.
And again, that's what we want to come back to.
It's not a correction where I would say, oh, like it's very... jarring.
It would go almost unnoticed essentially.
Now let's move on to have a look at other reporting verbs, because what I'd like you to do is move away from only using she said, they said, they told me, she told me, and broaden that a little bit.
Give yourself some more range.
One I quite like, but I don't hear a lot of people using is mention.
Tom mentioned that he would be at the meeting tomorrow.
It's a little bit lighter, perhaps a little bit more colloquial and certainly not as serious, we could say.
It's like, okay, well, Tom mentioned he might be coming to the meeting tomorrow.
The boss mentioned that there could be an issue with that, but he didn't go into it in more detail.
Another one I really like, especially if you're in the context of receiving some advice and you then want to report that to somebody.
Imagine you're in a meeting with, for example, HR or maybe it's the legal team and you want to tell your boss that they advised you not to go ahead.
You could simply say well, in the end, the HR team advised us not to go ahead with the project, which is a slightly more formal and specific verb than saying the HR team told us not to go ahead, which equally gets the message across.
But advised is more specific.
It's more accurate to the actions.
Imagine another scenario.
You're going to see a client, you're going to agree some different changes that you're going to make to the project.
Everything goes as planned and you want to go back and update your boss on that.
And you could say, the client confirmed that they were happy to go ahead.
Or even actually the client confirmed that they are happy to go ahead.
It actually feels more natural for me there to even use the present tense in the reported speech section.
Equally, you could just say the client said they are happy to go ahead.
But again, confirmed is closer and more accurate to what actually happened, right?
But what about if it's more of an ongoing discussion?
It's not necessarily a single sentence that was said, but it was more a conversation.
How do you tell somebody about that?
A really nice way that you can do this is to use the past continuous.
Imagine you're talking about a rollout or a launch and the people in the room in general throughout the discussion were saying it's just too fast.
It's too quick.
And you want to relay that to your boss.
In general, the group was saying that the rollout was too fast.
We actually ended up discussing whether we should delay phase two completely.
And Sarah was even talking about potentially scrapping phase two altogether.
I'm reporting what was said, but rather than a concrete, sharp comment, it's an ongoing discussion in the past, continuous
This is really, really common.
You've probably heard it before.
You may even use this naturally without thinking about it.
It softens the tone a little bit and does sound quite natural, especially in spoken updates which you might have with your boss quite frequently, like a catch up, for example.
Okay, so we've talked about speech, but what about if you want to report instructions?
Someone has told you to do something.
I think the most common one and that I would really recommend that you feel comfortable with is someone asked me to do something.
My boss asked me to get back to them later.
The client asked me to send them the file.
HR asked me to speak to the person in question and get some feedback.
What has your boss asked you to do?
For example, in this past coming week, what have you asked your team to do?
A point I'd like to make really, really clear, because this is a question that sometimes comes up.
Can I use demand instead of ask?
The client demanded me to send the file.
Short answer no, we don't use demand hardly ever.
Actually, to be honest, i would say in speech and certainly it's not a verb that you're going to be coming across on a day-to-day basis I would understand you if you said that, because to demand something is to ask for something in a very forceful way.
So I would understand it.
But if we look at my way of corrections like, red don't understand amber.
Yeah okay, I've got to make an effort and it sounds clunky.
It's absolutely an amber.
It's like, okay, it sounds weird.
I understand what you're saying, but the most natural way would be the client asked us.
And then my client would say yeah, but okay, but how do we get across the fact that it's in a very forceful way?
And we just say, they asked us to send it as soon as possible.
We don't necessarily have a verb, not one that springs to my mind that encapsulates all of that together.
I've also got a little bit of a bone to pick with the verb remark.
I get this question quite a lot, and maybe this is one you've heard before.
And people say, John remarked that...
It's really not a common reporting verb that we use in everyday speech, even in a formal context.
It is correct, but it would sound a little bit out of place in a meeting to say the client remarked that they were happy with the project, perhaps in a very formal situation.
But honestly, I think you've got other things available to you that sound more neutral.
To finish up, then I'm going to give you some examples with phrases that have different reporting verbs in them, just to give you an idea of how this looks in context.
I'm going to imagine that this is a board update that I'm reading, and there's several different things that I'm going to bring people up to speed on.
So just to bring you up to speed, the CFO mentioned that cash flow may tighten a little bit in quarter four.
And the board also advised us to prioritize high margin projects.
So that's, of course, what we're going to be focusing on.
Legal confirmed that the revised contract has been approved.
But at the moment, what we're hearing from compliance is that they still have some concerns about data storage issues.
That phrase what we're hearing from is a nice way to describe perhaps it's not a direct comment or statement from somebody, but from what we've gathered, from what we've heard and what we've been hearing from other people telling us, this is the conclusion that we're coming to, but it's not necessarily saying it's a direct quote or statement from them.
Let me give you another one.
And this is in the context of an internal leadership meeting.
Thanks, everyone.
I'm just going to quickly give you a very brief update.
HR told us that the restructuring proposal needs some further consultation, which we will get on with as soon as possible.
And they also emphasised that communication needs to remain consistent over this period of time, which I think We can all agree on.
Also, another point I wanted to just mention here was that some of the regional heads were saying that morale has stabilized, which is great, but they did mention that workload is still high.
So we may want to think about how we address that.
Notice what I did on that last sentence there.
I said, but they did mention that workload is still high.
I used the auxiliary in the sentence.
When we do that we want to add a little bit of emphasis.
And the reason why I did that in that sentence It was because in the previous part I said the regional heads were saying that morale has stabilized positive.
And then I'm shifting, but they did mention that workload is still high.
So I'm emphasizing the fact that we're moving from a positive point into a more critical point.
And I'm doing that by using the auxiliary in my sentence.
All right, let's leave that there for today then.
I hope you found that useful as a high-level overview for how you can use reported speech as a senior manager on a daily basis.
The whole point of doing these technical episodes is to give you some backing and some reassurance that either what you're saying is right or, if you've had a doubt about something, That you can clarify it and you're like okay, I know how to use it going forward, which is going to help you feel more confident to speak if you know what you're saying is right.
And of course, that's what we want.
We want you speaking up, contributing and participating with all of that wonderful knowledge and expertise that you have.
If you want to take the learning a bit further, I would absolutely encourage you to write out some of your own sentences that you can imagine yourself saying.
Start with say and tell and then think about what other verbs could I use there.
To broaden my range a little bit
Then give it a practice.
The sooner you can try something out, the better.
Do let me know how you get on.
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Thanks as always for choosing Confident Business English for your training.
It's been great to be here with you and I will see you again, same time, same place next week.
Bye-bye.
