Free Direct Speech [FDS]

Free direct speech is a type of speech presentation that indicates you are repeating the actual words of another person. You do this by surrounding the speech in punctuation (usually speech marks or inverted commas), but you do not use a reporting clause.

When you use free direct speech (FDS), people usually assume that you’re reporting the words of the other person verbatim – that you are reporting exactly what they said. This contrasts with indirect speech, where the text receiver expects more narrator interference. It is common for narrators to paraphrase or give the gist of a quote when using indirect speech.

It is still called free direct speech even if you misrepresent or lie about the actual quote. That’s because we’re talking about how the speech is presented, not whether it is true or not. When the narrator is deceiving us about what has actually been said, they are violating the maxim of quality.

You can be honest that you aren’t 100% sure about the quote through your language. For example, you might say “he said something like”. This would be a form of hedging.

The major difference between direct speech and free direct speech is the reporting clause. With direct speech, the narrator follows the quote by telling us who spoke, for example, “he said” or “she murmured”. That doesn’t happen with FDS. It’s just the words in quotation marks with no clause after it.

It is very common to use direct speech in creative writing to represent the speech of your characters. Once you’ve established who is talking and the characters are in a back-and-forth conversation, many writers would switch to free direct speech (FDS) so they don’t overuse direct speech.

Examples of Free Direct Speech

The most common usage of free direct speech is when we already know who is talking. The narrator will use direct speech to establish a back-and-forth conversation – usually between two characters. Then, when we get used to the pattern, and we can predict who will speak next, they switch to free direct speech. This stops it from being too repetitive. For example:

“What were you doing behind the curtain?” he asked.

“I was reading.”

“Show the book.”

In this example from Jane Eyre, we start with direct speech. It includes the reporting clause “he asked”. We know a man is asking Jane a question.

That makes us predict that Jane is going to be the one to reply. So, in the next quote, there’s no need to explain that it’s Jane talking. We expect that already! The only reason to include a reporting clause in the next piece of dialogue would be if someone else replied on her behalf. This would subvert our expectations, so it would need to be explained. That’s why Brontë switches to free direct speech.

However, that’s not the only example of when people might use free direct speech. Another common time is when they’re not sure who’s talking – or it doesn’t matter.

A good example is from one of Seamus Heaney’s poems, ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’:

Of those sanctioned, old, elaborate retorts:

 

'Oh, it's disgraceful, surely, I agree.'

'Where's it going to end?  It's getting worse.'

'They're murderers.'  'Internment, understandably...'

In this example, it doesn’t matter who is talking. It’s just the same cliché, meaningless words repeated by endless people over and over again. We don’t need to know who said it. Too many people did for him to take note. So, there’s no need for Heaney to use a reporting clause. That’s why he would use free direct speech for this example.

What Does the Word “Free” Mean in This Context?

The word “free” relates to whether it has a reporting clause or not. Free direct speech and free indirect speech both have no reporting clause.

Any time the name of a type of speech has the word “free” in it, the narrator isn’t explicitly telling you who is speaking. The reasons why we do this are very different for FDS than they are for FIS.

That’s the only thing that those two types of speech presentation have in common, though. FDS has the least amount of narrator interference out of all of the different types. It has less than direct speech does.

On the other hand, the lack of a reporting clause in free indirect speech makes it have more narrator interference. It has more than indirect speech. That’s because it’s hard to separate where the narrator’s words end and the quote begins. There’s a blending between the two.

When Would You Usually Use Free Direct Speech?

Free direct speech is most common in texts with a storyline – particularly fiction. Writers tend to use it when they have already established who is talking. The text receiver knows who is going to talk next because the characters have been taking turns to talk.

Or, it might be because it makes sense for a specific character to speak next. For example, if the last person to talk asked a specific character a question, it makes sense for that character to answer it. We don’t need to know who spoke because we can figure it out on our own.

Free direct speech is useful here because it gets rid of the need to say “he said” or “she said”, which can quickly feel overused in dialogue. Plus, it shows that you trust the reader to think for themselves. They always appreciate that.

Of course, when only one person is talking, it also makes sense to drop the reporting clause. No one is taking turns to talk, so there is no reason to be confused about who is talking. This is often the case in newspaper articles. The journalist could be reporting on a speech or interview with an important person. So, we know it’s them talking throughout.

On top of that, text producers use it when they don’t want to draw attention to the person speaking. That might be because lots of people have said the same thing and they don’t want to pin the dialogue on one specific person. It could be that they don’t know who said the words. Or maybe it’s just that they don’t want us to know!

Free Direct Speech and Narrator Interference

Mick Short mentions narrator interference in passing every time he talks about speech presentation in his work. It is much more fleshed out on the Lancaster University linguistics site.

Narrator interference is about how much control the narrator has over how we react to the quote. The more interference they have, the more of a role they play in how we interpret the quote and the person who originally said it.

On the scale of different kinds of speech presentation, free direct speech has the lowest level of narrator interference. However, that doesn’t mean there’s no interference at all!

The narrator still gets to control:

• When they quote the person.
• What parts of the quote they use.
• Their purpose for using the quote.
• Their tone, body language and facial expressions when saying the quote.
• The graphological details they use when they write the quote.
• How they pair the quote with context and narration.

All of these details will have an impact on how we will interpret the words. We will make assumptions about the person who said the quote and their intentions.

Plus, the narrator could also lie (violate the maxim of quality), misrepresent the words or take them out of context. That would mean they would have full control over how we react.

How Can You Use This In Your Essay?

If you want to talk about speech presentation in your essay, you need to think about why the writer has chosen one kind of speech presentation over all the others.

It’s more than that, though. There’s not a lot to say about the chosen speech presentation if it’s the norm of the genre or text type. I mean, we expect writers to switch between free direct speech and direct speech in novels, for example. So, it’s not that special and probably not worth writing about.

You should focus on when writers break rules, conventions or expectations, not when they follow them. That’s when they foreground their language to make us notice it more.

Here are a few cases where it would be useful to analyse free direct speech in a piece of writing:

• When a writer suddenly switches from the speech presentation type that they usually use to something else. This would be internal deviation.
• We don’t know who is talking, but the writer chooses to use free direct speech anyway. When this happens, the writer is probably trying to play with the fact that the speaker is unknown.
• You would expect another type of speech presentation to be used in this place because of the genre or text type.
• You already know that the person being quoted didn’t say what the narrator said they did. In this case, the narrator is trying to deceive their interlocutors. If the writer made you aware of the lie on purpose, they are trying to make an unreliable narrator.

It is important to focus on when writers break rules, rather than when they stick to them. They want their foregrounded language to stand out.

Then, it’s up to you to think about why that might be the case. Why would the writer want to draw attention to the speech presentation at that point? What is going on in the text at that time that might make this speech presentation relevant? How does it add to the message of the text?

Where Can You Learn More?

As I always say, it’s important that you don’t just rely on my definitions to teach you about speech presentation. I’ve read most of the important texts in speech presentation (unless I couldn’t find it). However, that doesn’t mean you can become an expert by just reading my work.

I highly recommend you read the work of the people who came up with these theories – or dedicated their lives to analysing them. If you’re an A-level student, I also recommend you check out what A-level textbook writers think you need to know for your exam.

The more different ways you access this information, the easier it will be for it to stick in your mind.

Mick Short is the authority on the subject of speech presentation, in my opinion. If you’re going to look up any of the sources I recommend, I’d start with his work.

• Discourse Presentation and Speech (and Writing, but not Thought) Summary – Mick Short
• Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing – Mick Short and Elena Semino
• The FutureLearn Stylistics Course by Dan McIntyre, Lesley Jeffries and Louise Nuttall at Huddersfield University
• Style in Fiction – Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short
• The Language of Literature: An Introduction to Stylistics – Marcello Giovanelli and Jessica Mason
• A/AS Level English Language and Literature for AQA Student Book – Marcello Giovanelli, Andrea Macrae, Felicity Titjen and Ian Cushing
• Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose – Mick Short
• Ways of Reading: Advanced Reading Skills for Students of English Literature – Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Tom Furniss and Sara Mills
• Stylistics – Lesley Jeffries and Dan McIntyre

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