There are two ways to quote others' words, one is to quote others' original words directly, which is called direct speech; The other is to report other people's words in your own words, not in quotation marks. This is an indirect speech.

For example, Xiao Ming said "I am a student".

If you quote directly, it can be "Xiaoming said' I am a student'".

In indirect speech, it can be expressed as "Xiaoming says he is a student".

Extended data:

Quoting or paraphrasing others' words is called "quoting". Direct reference, marked with quotation marks on both sides, is called direct reference; Reporting others' words in your own language without quotation marks is called indirect speech. In fact, indirect speech is mostly an object clause.

Then direct speech is declarative sentence, general question, special question and imperative sentence. When converting into indirect speech, we should change the sentence structure, person, tense, adverbial of time and adverbial of place.