The Impersonation Essay
Modeled after one of the exercises in the progymnasmata, a series of rhetorical exercises used by the ancient Greeks, the impersonation assignment is an exercise designed to teach students to imitate the style and ethos of a particular character. A successfully written impersonation will help a student to understand speech as argument, considering character, audience, and situation. This assignment works best with a play or other text in which characters have longer chunks of dialogue.
The final product is an original speech, written by the student in the voice of a selected character, within an invented scene in the play. In addition, the students write an analysis of their own speech, explaining why they made the choices that they made along the way.
This assignment is designed to be used after the entire text has been read, though it would be useful to do close readings of monologues in the play as you are teaching it in order to begin preparing students for the final assessment.
AI note: While you can ask ChatGPT to create a speech for you, written by one of these characters--and even ask it to write in iambic pentameter, and do an analysis of that speech--the success of this assignment (and perhaps all good writing assignments) is in the scaffolding. Once students have been guided through each step, the next step seems doable. The requirement of completing each discreet step helps to combat the temptation to have the chatbot do the work for you.
Example using Romeo and Juliet
Step 1
Select a character to focus on. This character should have enough dialogue that their speech patterns can be analyzed. In this case, students were asked to choose between Romeo, Juliet, and Friar Lawrence.
Step 2
Complete a character analysis of your selected character: list 4-6 qualities that seem essential to the character's makeup, find at least two pieces of textual evidence that demonstrate each quality, explain how each piece of text relates to the quality.
Step 3
Select a speech of 15-20 lines by your character. Type up this speech, using enlarged text and double spacing to leave lots of room for annotations. Complete three (plus) guided readings of the speech:
1) define all the words you don't know
2) summarize the speech by chunks or sentences
3) analysis: what do you notice about the character's choice of words? sentence structure? patterns? repetition?
Step 4
Reflect: What do you notice about this character’s patterns of speech, expressions, rhythms, etc.? What makes this character’s language unique? How does this speech demonstrate this character’s qualities?
Step 5
Next you'll be writing a speech in the voice of your character in a new context. The character’s morals, speaking style, emotional state, and distinctive traits should all be apparent in the speech. Choose one of the following contexts:
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Imagine that the Montagues and Capulets discovered that Romeo and Juliet had married at the end of Act 3, and that your chosen character has the opportunity to give a speech to Lord and Lady Capulet, Lord and Lady Montague, Paris, and Prince Escalus. What would he or she say?
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Imagine that, at the end of Act 3, your character has received a letter indicating that Lord and Lady Capulet and Lord and Lady Montague have found out that Romeo and Juliet have married. Your character is alone. What would s/he say aloud to him/herself at this news?
Step 6
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Write out in modern prose, brainstorm-style, what you think the character would feel and say in this specific situation.
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Convert this writing to a formal speech, imitating the character’s style as you see it in Shakespeare’s work. Work to maintain rough iambic pentameter.
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Annotate this invented speech, noting which elements demonstrate particular character traits.
Step 7
Explicate, or complete a close reading of, your own invented speech. This means, essentially, that you will take your annotations from Step 6 and formalize them in an essay format.
Step 8
Deliver your speech, followed by a brief discussion of how the speech encapsulates the qualities of the character.