Drawing on a corpus of 35 hours of videotaped face-to-face conversations collected in Beijing and Hebei, China, this conversation analytic study examines self-praising behavior of Mandarin speakers in everyday social interaction. Focusing on two reporting practices--reporting another's words and reporting "just the facts"--the investigation explores how these practices are used strategically by the speakers in the course of reporting some past event to tacitly achieve a positive presentation of themselves in the current interaction. Analysis of a collection of instances shows several key features shared by these two practices that enable such an interactional task. A discussion of the fit between the practices and the designed action, as well as a possible account for this interconnection, is offered at the end. (Contains 27 footnotes.)