In Quotation marks^x, Tenses^x

Hi Caesar, Given the hint from your teacher, try this: Carol claimed, "Mary said, 'Sally is not herself when she calls David a toad.'" (Note quotation marks at the end.) Verb tense change is-- Mary 'said' (past) and 'Sally is/calls' (present). Or, maybe-- Carol claims, "Mary...

Paco: "Any time ahead of now" is "future" in the physical sense. In reality, "grammatical future" is not built in English. The times conceived by old Anglo-Saxons were only two: present and past. This is the reason why English speaking people have contrived many ways to express "future"; "be to...

Jack, As I see it, the reason for the use of present & past tense in this story is: The narrator (Margaret) is telling her story now, in the present. "My daughter IS an athlete" She then goes on to talk about the past "Until her freshman year in high school, Ann WAS only marginally...

Playing to Win by Margaret A. Whitney 1 My daughter is an athlete. Nowadays, this statement won’t strike many parents as unusual, but it does me. Until her freshman year in high school, Ann was only marginally interested in sport of any kind. When she played, she didn’t swing hard,...

I saw this article from the web and I think it is worth to post part of the article in this forum. Following is the article ...AND REPORTED SPEECH Dear English Doctor, Please explain about word changes in reported speech. If you say to me "My sister is going to Chiang Mai", I...

I was trying to show you the most typical uses. You can probably find all possible combinations somewhere. Without writing an entire book or two on the subject, it would be impossible to discuss them all. When reporting speech, you can use the present introduced by the past if what you are...

I often see from weblog that people often use the present tense for what their elders told them even most of the time their elders are already dead. For example (Fact: All the grandpas in the following cases are dead.) a) My old grandpa used to tell me that when a friend who has always...

When I am reading Anderson's fairy tale, the flying trunk. I found that the following sentense doesn't have both double quotation mark. "'Now you are talking too fast,' spluttered the fire. so I thought that it was mistyping. But it's not. Plz tell me why sentence is right.