Standard actions concerning other people
giving it toshowing it towakingthrowing it atattackingkissinganswering it thattelling it aboutasking it aboutasking it for
Telling something about some text (past tense told it about): applying to one thing and one topic
The Standard Rules do not include any systematic way to handle conversation: instead, Inform is set up so that it is as easy as we can make it to write specific rules handling speech in particular games, and so that if no such rules are written then all attempts to communicate are gracefully if not very interestingly rejected.
The topic here can be any double-quoted text, which can itself contain tokens in square brackets: see the documentation on Understanding.
Telling is an action existing only to catch commands like TELL ALEX ABOUT GUITAR. Customarily in IF, such a command is shorthand which the player accepts as a conventional form: it means 'tell Alex what I now know about the guitar' and would make sense if the player had himself recently discovered something significant about the guitar which might interest Alex.
Typed commands leading to this action
"tell [someone] about [text]" - telling it about
Rules controlling this action
check an actor telling something about telling yourself rule name unlist
report an actor telling something about block telling rule name unlist