Roald Dahl's Writing Style & Themes
Dahl’s writing style involves a
great deal of humour to engage his readers. His Humour and sarcasm appeal to his
intended audience as children love reading funny stories with nonsense words
and absurd behaviour.
He normally writes from a child’s
perspective, one that children can familiarise themselves with.
Dahl’s silly character names help the reader identify with the characters personality and traits and his overuses of descriptive adjectives also give the reader a great deal of information about the character and the situation. He often uses exaggeration to make the characters seem more evil or heroic.
He believes that all good books need to have a mixture of nasty people you loathe and some nice people. That way the reader can thoroughly enjoy the ‘baddies’ get their comeuppance. Most of Dahl’s bestselling books entail this combination.
Dahl writes from a modern-day fairy tale world, particularly focusing on the magical world, one that excites young children and draws them in to explore.
He likes to twist and invent words and play around with the sentence structure in an attempt to get words to sound exactly as they are written in an attempt to immerse the reader in the story.
He uses poetry, similes, metaphors, alliteration and puns that entices the reader and adds to his writing.
Personification is often used in Dahl’s stories also, to transform characters, mainly animals, into human-like forms or vice-versa, with a mind of their own and where they can speak like real humans.
Dahl also quite often portrays the image of children in books, ‘better’ than adults, giving children space for imagination into a world like this.
Dahl’s silly character names help the reader identify with the characters personality and traits and his overuses of descriptive adjectives also give the reader a great deal of information about the character and the situation. He often uses exaggeration to make the characters seem more evil or heroic.
He believes that all good books need to have a mixture of nasty people you loathe and some nice people. That way the reader can thoroughly enjoy the ‘baddies’ get their comeuppance. Most of Dahl’s bestselling books entail this combination.
Dahl writes from a modern-day fairy tale world, particularly focusing on the magical world, one that excites young children and draws them in to explore.
He likes to twist and invent words and play around with the sentence structure in an attempt to get words to sound exactly as they are written in an attempt to immerse the reader in the story.
He uses poetry, similes, metaphors, alliteration and puns that entices the reader and adds to his writing.
Personification is often used in Dahl’s stories also, to transform characters, mainly animals, into human-like forms or vice-versa, with a mind of their own and where they can speak like real humans.
Dahl also quite often portrays the image of children in books, ‘better’ than adults, giving children space for imagination into a world like this.