Sentence Clause trouble (I think?)

Here is the problem: I often write summaries outlining the lives of people from the past, so everything is written in past tense. However, since I am writing a summary based on the person telling the story about their lives, I constantly have to compose the sentence indicating that they said it. It’s strictly for legal purposes.

For example: I read a passage about a woman talking about her childhood growing up near Lake Tahoe. The exact passage I read is: when I was twelve years old, everyday in the summertime I went down to the lake and skipped rocks on the water. I always chose the smoothest rocks because they skid the farthest on the water. Sometimes I would pick a huge, bulky stone to see how big of a splash I could make. In order to summarize correctly, I need to write (Annie is the hypothetical little girl): Annie stated that at the age of twelve, she skipped rocks on Tahoe lake everyday using very smooth stones. She added that on occasion, she threw bulky stones into the lake to see how large she could make a splash.

Now, those two sentences are fine and dandy (maybe a few comma splices here and there), but once you start getting into the 13^th and 14^th page of writing about a person’s life, she stated this or she indicated that or she explained this, starts to sound extremely redundant when that is the beginning to every sentence. The flow becomes choppy. So, some people here (I won’t name names) began structuring their sentences a little differently, and its created quite a stir. So taking that same example I used above, the sentences are now framed like this: While skipping rocks on Lake Tahoe, Annie stated that she used only the smoothest rocks since they traveled the farthest across the surface. During the times that she wanted to create a large splash, Annie indicated that large stones were used.

Here is the problem: according to some people, the way that those sentences are structured, it now actually reads: while annie was skipping rocks on the tahoe lake, she said that she used smooth rocks. As in, while she was performing the action she made the statement right there in that time (as a twelve year old girl) she was saying that she used smooth rocks to skid farther. Which is not what we want the sentence to say. We want it to keep that original meaning of her telling the story: Annie stated that she did this or that a long time ago. NOT: a long time ago, annie said she did this or that.

Please help! If composing the sentence in that “NEW” structure is wrong, can you please explain why? Or what it’s called? And if it’s right, why? I feel like it’s right (maybe because “that” has been inserted along with a pronoun “her” after “Annie” (I think is the subject in this case) has been used), but I’m not exactly the grammar buff.

Thanks!

Elise