Can I use こと or の to say "Everyone said that ～"?

Question

I study japanese on my own, so i dont really have a teacher to correct my sentences. I am trying coming up with some sentences to help me fixating things on my mind.

So I want to make the following sentence "everyone said she is not intelligent because she is beautiful"

I had already the compound sentence:

彼女はきれいだから賢くない です

And then I turned it into:

皆さん彼女はきれいだから賢くないこと話した

Is it right? Also, can i replace こと for の or のこと? Will it change the meaning of the sentence?

One more thing, is it okay to make such posts on the forum, asking for help on sentences and not exactly a grammar aspect? If not please let me know.

Answer 1

Do you know the と particle (aka the quotative particle)? When you quote someone's statement, you need to use と instead of を or こと. This sentence should at least be:

皆さん彼女はきれいだから賢くないと話した。

This still sounds unnatural because 皆さん is a fairly polite and formal word, whereas 話した is not polite and the content of the talk itself is not polite. This is a problem about register, and it's always a difficult part of learning foreign languages. Anyway:

• 皆さん、彼女はきれいだから賢くないと話していました。
  (when you politely report to your boss what you've heard)
• 彼女はきれいだから賢くないとみんな話した。
  (when you say this not particularly politely)

Actually I feel native speakers will choose different phrases to make this sound more funny, rude, sarcastic, etc. But perhaps you need to learn the basic grammar first.

As an aside, when you say "talk about (some-topic)", you cannot use と because it's not a quotation. Instead, you can use ～のこと like this:

皆さん彼女のことを話しています。 Everyone is talking about her.