In-Role Writing Tips

In-role writing is a special opportunity to use all of your persuasive skills and tools.

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. 

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. 

Bias

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 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 retain what you learned in the unit.

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). 

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 saw their world. 

 

Don’t judge the past by today’s values. Don’t overreact to things that would bother modern people, such as injustices. 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 such as protests and press conferences. By contrast, Athenians and Spartans likely would have had strong feelings about each other!

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