5 exercises — indirect speech for stand-ups, ticket updates, code reviews, and escalation emails.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
A developer says in a stand-up: "The feature is ready for review." Later the PM emails: "The developer said that the feature _____ for review."
Tense shift in reported speech: present simple "is" → past simple "was." This is the standard backshift when using "said." However, if the statement is still true at reporting time, present tense is also acceptable in informal contexts. Formal written reporting (emails, tickets) consistently uses backshift.
2 / 5
An architect writes in a design doc: "The team _____ that horizontal scaling _____ the better approach for this workload."
"Confirmed that ... is" — when reporting a fact that is still true (horizontal scaling is still the better approach), no tense shift is required. "Confirmed" (past tense reporting verb) is correct as the decision was made in the past, but "is" can remain because the fact is still current. This is a key subtlety of English reported speech.
3 / 5
A ticket comment reads: "The QA engineer reported that three tests _____ due to a race condition and that a fix _____ by end of sprint."
Double backshift: "are failing" → "were failing" and "will be submitted" → "would be submitted." Both shifts are correct in formal written reports using "reported." This pattern appears in sprint retrospectives, QA reports, and incident documentation.
4 / 5
Choose the most natural sentence for a code review comment:
"told me that" is correct — "tell" requires a personal object (me, him, the team). "said me" is a very common non-native error. Option C is also the strongest professionally, as it reports both the criticism and the suggestion. "said to me" is grammatically possible but unusual in technical contexts.
5 / 5
An incident retrospective document states that the on-call engineer _____ the severity to P1 at 03:14 UTC and _____ that the primary database _____ unavailable.
"escalated / stated / was" — past simple for the actions, with backshifted "was" in the embedded reported clause. This is the standard tense pattern for incident timelines: simple past for sequential events + backshift in embedded clauses. "had escalated" (past perfect) would imply the escalation happened before another past event already mentioned, which is not the case here.