5 exercises — practise backshifting quotes accurately when writing postmortems and incident timelines.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
The on-call engineer said, "The database is failing over right now." Which sentence correctly reports this in a postmortem written the next day?
"The on-call engineer said that the database was failing over at that time" is correct: the reporting verb "said" triggers backshift, so present continuous "is failing" becomes past continuous "was failing", and the time reference "right now" shifts to "at that time" since the report is written later, not in the moment. Option A keeps the present tense and "right now" unchanged, which misrepresents when the statement was made. Option C incorrectly shifts to a habitual present simple, losing the in-progress meaning. Option D mixes a present reporting verb with a backshifted past tense but keeps "right now", an inconsistent combination.
2 / 5
The SRE said, "I restarted the pod five minutes ago." Which sentence correctly reports this in the incident timeline?
"The SRE said that she had restarted the pod five minutes earlier" is correct: past simple "restarted" backshifts to past perfect "had restarted" to show it happened before the reporting time, and "ago" (relative to the speaker's moment) shifts to "earlier" (relative to a reference point in the narrative). Option B keeps both "restarted" and "ago" unshifted, which is acceptable only when reporting immediately, not in a written timeline reconstructed later. Option C incorrectly uses present perfect with "ago", which is ungrammatical since "ago" requires a specific past time frame. Option D uses an unconjugated base form "restart", which is not valid past reporting.
3 / 5
The team lead said, "We will roll back the deployment tomorrow." Which sentence correctly reports this a week later in the postmortem document?
"The team lead said that they would roll back the deployment the next day" is correct: "will" backshifts to "would", and "tomorrow" (relative to the day the team lead spoke) shifts to "the next day" (relative to the narrated timeline), since the document is written well after the fact. Option B fails to backshift the modal at all. Option C correctly backshifts "will" to "would" but leaves "tomorrow" unshifted, which becomes ambiguous or wrong once the report is read later. Option D changes the meaning by introducing a future perfect that was not part of the original statement.
4 / 5
The customer wrote in a support ticket, "Your API has been returning 500 errors since Monday." Which sentence correctly reports this in an internal summary?
"The customer reported that our API had been returning 500 errors since Monday" is correct: present perfect continuous "has been returning" backshifts to past perfect continuous "had been returning", correctly preserving both the ongoing, repeated nature of the errors and their connection to a still-relevant starting point ("since Monday"). Option A fails to backshift at all. Option C loses the continuous, ongoing aspect and the "since" time-anchor no longer fits naturally with simple past. Option D loses the continuous aspect, implying a single completed action rather than a repeated, ongoing problem.
5 / 5
The vendor's engineer said, "We can't reproduce this bug on our end." Which sentence correctly reports this in an escalation summary?
"The vendor's engineer said that they couldn't reproduce the bug on their end" is correct: the modal "can't" backshifts to "couldn't", the pronoun "our" (referring to the vendor's own team from their perspective) shifts to "their" from the reporter's perspective, and "this" shifts to "the" since it is no longer being pointed to directly. Option A fails to backshift the modal. Option C incorrectly keeps "our end", which would wrongly suggest the vendor's team is the same as the reporter's team. Option D mixes an unshifted modal with an ungrammatical past participle after "cannot".