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Notes on style

  • Uttered Represented Speech is a device, which conveys to the reader the unuttered or inner speech of the character, thus presenting the thoughts and feelings. Uttered represented speech demands that the tense should be switched from present to past and the personal pro­nouns should be changed from 1st and 2nd person to 3rd person as in indirect speech, but the syntactical structure of the utterance does not change. For example: His anonymous correspondent's criticism, however, lingered in his mind. Did he really fail to come to grips with his characters? Perhaps he did.

  • Find in the text other examples of uttered represented speech and analyse them.

    1. Give a summary of the text.

    2. Read the story "W.S." by L.P. Hartley to the end, and say whether it has come up to your expectations. What do you think is the point of the story?