Map of the Book

Abstract

Reporting speech normally involves a process of changing tenses, pronouns and time and place words. In this unit, we focus instead on a simpler way – and a special use of the past continuous. A: How did it go? B: Not very well. I started by saying to him, ‘Look, if we don’t find a way of working together, we’ll never get the product launch ready in time.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know we had a problem.’ So I said, ‘Well, you haven’t replied to any of my last three e-mails.’