The Twitter Template for Deep Understanding

There is a super-simple way to get students to recognize tone, understand character, and experiment with voice all at the same time.

This year I had my students assume the identity of characters in the novels we were reading and write fake Tweets from the perspective of that character. I instructed them to think of these tweets as a way to express a character’s deepest, inner-most thoughts without fear of consequence.

I once wrote that there are some common problems I have run into in my classroom when teaching tone, such as:

They don’t know what it means.
They know the definition but they don’t know how to apply it to a text.
They think it means the author’s attitude, they don’t understand that it reflects the speaker, character or narrator.
They confuse tone with mood.
They can recognize it on a basic, glaring level, like when a speaker is sad or angry.
They see tone as one consistent attitude, but they struggle to see how it changes or shifts.

When students successfully and accurately comprehend tone, they are perceptive to the way in which word choice (diction) and sentence structure (syntax) influence a speaker’s attitude. And once they recognize tone, they can understand how it impacts other elements like characterization, conflict, and theme.

This assignment did all that. It may have been the most enjoyable classroom experience my students have had this year because they were able to incorporate their knowledge of the Twitter platform in a way that showed deep understanding, all while trying to entertain their classmates.

I’ve included the Google Slides template I shared with the students at the end of the post. It is yours for free if you want it.

This is what the template looked like:

This is what one assignment looked like:

Assignment — Compose tweets for the following moments in chapters 1-3 of The Great Gatsby from the perspective of the character in bold. Develop a profile picture, a Twitter handle, tweet, and hashtags for each moment.

Daisy talks about her daughter (pgs 16-17)

George reacts to Tom visiting his garage (25-26)

Myrtle reacts to Tom’s slap (37)

Nick meets Gatsby (47-48)

Jordan’s conversation with Gatsby (52)

Here’s another example.

Assignment — Compose tweets for the following moments in Mudbound from the perspective of the character in bold. Develop a profile picture, a Twitter handle, tweet, and hashtags for each moment.