Latin composition has been on our minds lately here on CANEns, and today I wanted to share with you a technique I’ve used successfully in my own classroom, viam sume propriam, or “choose your own path.” It’s a great way to use Latin composition at any level to review unit concepts and for students to show off what they know in a creative, fun way. I myself most recently used it as a final project for an senior level Latin class in lieu of an exam.
What is viam sume propriam all about? First, some history. Back in the 80s, catching the Dungeons and Dragons craze, a number of publishers started writing Choose Your Own Adventure books. These books were interactive stories in which, by making choices at important narrative crossroads, you could affect how the story unfolded. Each section of the story was presented to you in sentence, paragraph, or page-long chunks headed by a number. These numbers were narrative structure points used when making choices (i.e. if you want to go back and find your wife while Troy burns, turn to 27. If you’d rather flee into the mountains with your father, turn to 110.). Recently, this format has been making a small comeback through Apple and Android apps. See, for instance, Sorcery!, or Frankenstein, which are built using the same tool I use for viam sume propriam), and CANE’s own Ed DeHoratius’ Follow Your Fates adventure books that retell classic myths.
Essentially the students (usually in groups) create a branching narrative, in Latin, which can lead to several possible outcomes. Some of these outcomes are bad, some good, some merely neutral alternatives. Because this is a structure, it can be used at nearly any level with any grammar. At the upper level, for example, students can create possible outcomes to the Dido and Aeneas story, or show how different choices by Caesar might have prevented his assassination, using subjunctives, conditionals, and oratio obliqua. At the novice level, a student can create, for example, a path through a Roman villa, or some variation on a textbook reading (how does Quintus escape Pompeii in CLC?, or can the carriage avoid that ditch in Ecce Romani?), focusing on nom vs. acc forms, or including dialogue to work on personal endings.
There are a number of ways to do this assignment, from bluebooking to using Power Point (since you can link slides together), but lately I’ve been using a tool called Inklewriter. Available free of charge, it’s an online tool designed to make this kind of story. It’s trivially easy to make branching paths and add pictures. What is very interesting is that Inklewriter has a if-then logic language that you can use to make more complicated twists to a narrative. For example, you can only choose to enter a locked door if earlier you picked up the right key.
How do the logistics work? I structure the assignment like this:

• what will the story be about – what themes or explorations of character / place you expect
• how many choice-points (i.e. story chunks at the end of which you have to make a decision)
• how long the story chunks are (i.e. a sentence or two at the novice level up to a paragraph at the upper level)
• how many story end points there will be (I often make it variable, say 2 + # of students in group)
• how much time in class students will have to organize, write, and edit
• how much time students will have to examine each others’ work

There are a few caveats – it’s easy for this assignment to take a lot of time, because there’s planning to do and a surprising amount of Latin to write. Secondly, Inklewriter is currently still working some bugs out, and students have had some issues with parts of their story “disappearing.” Still, it’s a powerful tool my own students found intuitive to use. I’ll end by letting the work speak for itself. Da Auxilium is an unedited example from one of my own students, based on a unit we did on medieval medicine. Can you use cutting edge Four Humor technology to save your patient?