Marking reported speech when the rule and the meaning disagree
Rupam, a Madhyamik candidate, has been given 4 out of 5 in the grammar section of a school test by a trainee teacher, and the senior teacher must confirm the mark before the script is returned. The item asked for four rewrites, one mark each, plus one mark for overall accuracy in spelling and sentence correctness. The directions were: (i) He said to me, “I am leaving for Digha tomorrow.” - into indirect speech; (ii) The teacher said, “Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius.” - into indirect speech; (iii) Someone has broken the window pane. - into the passive; (iv) “Do not waste your time,” the headmaster told us. - into indirect speech.
Rupam wrote: (i) He told me that he was leaving for Digha the next day. (ii) The teacher said that water boiled at 100 degrees Celsius. (iii) The window pane has been broken. (iv) The headmaster told us not to waste our time.
He also wrote “head master” as two words and began item (iii) with a small letter.
1. Is 4 out of 5 the right total? Fix the mark item by item and justify each decision.
Read the worked answer
Item (i) - 1 mark. The backshift (am → was), the pronoun change (I → he), the reporting verb (said to me → told) and tomorrow → the next day are all correct. Full credit.
Item (ii) - 0. “Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius” is a permanent scientific truth, so the present tense survives the shift into indirect speech: The teacher said that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. Rupam's “boiled” is the one change that must be penalised, because it turns a law of nature into a fact about the past.
Item (iii) - 1. “Someone” is an indefinite agent and is normally dropped in the passive; The window pane has been broken keeps the tense of the original and needs no “by someone”.
Item (iv) - 1. A negative imperative becomes told/ordered/advised + object + not to + verb. Correct.
Accuracy mark - 0. Two errors: “head master” should be one word, and a sentence cannot begin with a small letter. This is exactly the slip the fifth mark exists to catch.
Total: 3 out of 5. The trainee teacher's 4 forgives either the tense error in (ii) or both accuracy slips; neither is defensible if the marking is to be consistent across the batch.
2. Rupam argues: “The sentence was in the past tense, so I changed boils to boiled. My answer follows the rule.” Write the explanation you would give him, and name the trap item you would add to next week's practice so the class does not repeat it.
Read the worked answer
Start by conceding what is right in his reasoning: backshift is the default, and in three of his four items it worked. The error is treating the default as the rule. The tense shifts because the reporting has moved into the past; it does not shift when the reported statement is permanently true - scientific laws, proverbs, habitual facts, mathematical truths. Give him a one-question test: “Was this true before the speaker said it, and will it still be true next year?” If yes, keep the present.
Trap item for next week, set beside a normal one so the contrast is visible:
- Our teacher said, “Honesty is the best policy.” → Our teacher said that honesty is the best policy. (No backshift.)
- She said, “I am busy now.” → She said that she was busy then. (Backshift.)
Add a second trap on the reporting verb: The teacher said, “The sun rises in the east.” Students often write “told” because a teacher is being addressed; but “said” has no listener here, so “said that” is correct and “told” would need an object (“told us that”). Mark the two errors separately so the class sees that the tense rule and the said/told rule are independent.
3. A colleague insists that after “Do not…” only “ordered” is acceptable, and that “The headmaster forbade us to waste our time” should be marked wrong. Evaluate both claims.
Read the worked answer
Both claims are too strict. What the imperative transformation requires is (a) a reporting verb whose force matches the speaker's, and (b) the pattern verb + object + (not) to + infinitive. “Told”, “ordered”, “advised”, “warned” and “asked” all satisfy (b); the choice among them is a judgement about force, not a grammatical rule. “Told” is neutral and safest, “ordered” adds authority the headmaster does have, “advised” softens it. Marking only “ordered” correct punishes candidates for a distinction the question never asked them to make.
The second claim is simply wrong: forbade us to waste our time is grammatical, keeps the negative force, and is arguably neater than “told us not to”. “Forbade us not to” would be the double negative to reject.
What should be rejected: The headmaster told us to not waste our time - the split “to not” is disfavoured in this paper's convention and should be corrected to “not to”, though it should not cost a full mark if the transformation is otherwise sound. "The headmaster said us not to waste our time" fails on the verb pattern and does lose the mark. The principle to give the colleague: mark the structure and the meaning, not the synonym you happened to have in the key.