Real indirect speech Exercises in books like this are useful for practising the grammar of indirect speech, but they are necessarily rather artificial.
In real life, when we report what people say, we re-express their meaning, but we don't necessarily keep very close to the original words.
The sentence 'I think your hair looks great', for example, might be reported as 'She said she liked my hair' or 'She thought my hair was terrific' or in many other ways.
And it would be strange to report 'Isn't she beautiful!' as 'He asked if she wasn't beautiful'.
Indirect speech in English is mostly a matter of common sense. saying what is natural in the situation. The notes and exercises in this Section may be useful, but there is no need to learn a lot of complicated rules.
