If Shakespeare’s Characters Could Tweet

In my College Prep English 9 class, I had my students create tweets from the characters

in Romeo and Juliet using a tweet generator website. They were given this assignment after

reading 2 acts of the play. At this point in the play, characters had developed enough, so the

students were able to create tweets that capture the different characters and their character traits.

The instructions they were given were:

Use this link https://www.tweetgen.com

You must make one solo tweet for one character.

You must make one reply chain with 4 tweets between at least 2 characters.

You can create these tweets in 2 different ways.

Option 1- Take lines/situations from the play and change them so that they become a modern

tweet. Use slang and our language. If these characters were living in today's world and used

twitter, they would not be using words like thou, chid'st, withal, etc.

Option 2- Taking into consideration what these characters are like and the situations they are in,

you may create tweets that the characters might have tweeted if they had twitter. For example,

you can create tweets that show how these characters would react to current situations/issues or

things in pop culture. Make sure they are specific to the character that is "sending" the tweet. 

Get creative with their usernames.

To turn in you can either:

Save your tweets as images and submit them as 2 revisions

OR

Save your tweets as images and put them in a word document

 This assignment works well with this material and this age group because it allows them

to make Shakespeare plays—which can be difficult to understand and are antiquated—more

relatable. This is a chance for students to take something like Shakespeare and make it more

modern with the use of technology. Not only are they getting to do something fun, but they are

still learning about the characters and what they are like.