Athens vs. Sparta Assignment, Oct. 2025 (most of my links will disappear when I retire in June, FYI)

In-Role Writing Tips

In-role writing is a special opportunity to use all of your persuasive skills and tools. You are writing during the time of Pericles’ rule during the Peloponnesian War.

Adjectives

• Words that describe nouns
  • They add more information 

Boring Example: MASH, my favourite television show, is funny. 

Colourful example: MASH, my favourite television show of all time, is screwball comedy combined with touching moments that make you forgive the bad jokes. 

Athens vs. Sparta Assignment, Oct. 2025 (most of my links will disappear when I retire in June, FYI)

Adverbs

• Words that describe verbs
  • They add more information 

Boring sentence: The cat walked to the kitchen to get her dinner. 

Colourful example with adverb: The cat walked daintily to the kitchen to devour her dinner ferociously. 

Athens vs. Sparta Assignment, Oct. 2025 (most of my links will disappear when I retire in June, FYI)

Bias / Perspectives

Put yourself as closely as you can into the shoes of the person you are speaking/writing as. 

When you do this you have to take on their biases (negative and positive) and perspectives (views) as well. That means you need to know their attitudes, values, beliefs, likes, dislikes, and all that stuff – both positive and negative. To know those things you need context – understanding of the things that went on at the time! In other words, try to apply what you learned in the unit.

• foundation of democracy in Athens
• way of life in Athens and Sparta (readings and sub-topics)
• Peloponnesian War: Pericles’ Funeral Oration (speech)
• Women: vases activity and inferences; Aristotle’s Oikonomikos

You are still the writer/speaker – you bring some of yourself, such as your interpretations and inferences about their context (the world in which they lived), without being presentist. No yellow cards, please!

Role = self + other

Make sure you know the circumstances or context in which they lived. Don’t make factual errors when you’re writing in the role of an historical character. 

Take on their perspectives, their views. Think about how they would have seen things, not how you would see things. Think about their age, gender, position in society, occupation, religion, etc. These factors influenced how they experienced their world. 

Athens vs. Sparta Assignment, Oct. 2025 (most of my links will disappear when I retire in June, FYI)

 

Don’t judge the past by today’s values. Especially when it comes to interpreting the lives of Athenian and Spartan women, historians have varied opinions about the extent of women’s roles and participation in different aspects of daily life. People on the lower rungs of social hierarchies would probably have felt wronged, but they probably wouldn’t have expressed their feelings in modern ways; in almost all of history there is dissent (disagreement). But dissent would have likely been expressed differently than today. Athenians and Spartans – enemies during the Peloponnesian War – likely would have had strong feelings about each other!

Comments are closed