If the teacher wisher to test student mastery of indirect speech in writing, he can have a narrative rewritten in this form. Using the example from the previous paragraph, we have:
Mrs. Farias asked her daughter Joana to tell her about Michael. Joana replied that he very tall...
A typical request in guided-composition testing is to have students make a specific grammatical change: for example, to change the passage from the present continuous to the past, or from the singular to the plural. In the passage below, instructions ask for students to tell this in the third person instead of the first person. The narrator is a girl named Molly: