Reviewing Your Favorite Character Description

Reviewing Your Favorite Character Description

Last week, we asked our readers and listeners to write about their favorite character from a book they had read. One reader, Arunabh wrote to us about their favorite character, Matilda, from the children’s book with the same name, Matilda by Roald Dahl.

In this week's Everyday Grammar, we will review parts of Arunabh’s description of Matilda.

Arunabh’s description of Matilda

Matilda is brilliant, resilient, creative and kind, despite growing up in difficult circumstances.

Her parents treat her poorly, but she manages to read books, thus she gets ahead of other children in her class. She also develops magical powers to defeat Miss Trunchbull.

Matilda said, “…Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable..."

When Miss Trunchbull refuses to take Matilda to a higher form, Miss Honey continues to nurture her…She allows Matilda to read high-level textbooks while the rest of her class learns simple reading and math…

Review of Arunabh’s description of Matilda

Let us look at how Arunabh first describes Matilda.

Matilda is brilliant, resilient, creative and kind, despite growing up in difficult circumstances.

Arunabh uses four adjectives to describe Matilda. “Brilliant” means very bright, and in this case refers to Matilda’s mind. She is very smart. “Resilient” is a good choice for describing Matilda. Because of her family, she has become very mentally strong.

Arunabh uses the preposition “despite” to contrast the surprising information that Matilda had a hard childhood. “Growing up” is a gerund meaning to change from a child into an adult. We use the “ing” form of the verb to make a gerund, but unlike verbs, gerunds are nouns.

Arunabh describes Matilda as creative. Another word for this is "imaginative." Children use their imaginations all the time. And lastly, he describes her as “kind” or caring and nice. Matilda is always looking out for her classmates and friends.

Let’s continue to the next part of the description

Her parents treat her poorly, but she manages to read books, thus she gets ahead of other children in her class. She also develops magical powers to defeat Miss Trunchbull.

Arunabh describes how other characters act towards Matilda. We find out how Matilda’s parents “treat” her or behave towards her. He uses the adverb “poorly” to describe her parents’ mistreatment of her.

Another adverb “thus” is used in this paragraph. “Thus” is used to refer to a result of something that you just said. So because Matilda reads books she was able to be at the top of her class.

Arunabh also uses descriptive verbs like “develops” and the infinitive form “to defeat” which means to beat or win a victory over.

In the next part of the description, we see Matilda's speech within quotation marks.

Matilda said, “…Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable..."

Here, Matilda is talking about Miss Trunchbull’s actions against her students. No one, not even the parents, believe how Miss Trunchbull is hurting her students.

“Go the whole hog” is an idiom meaning to do something completely or thoroughly.

Lastly, let’s look at the last group of sentences, and here we have some suggestions.

When Miss Trunchbull refuses to take Matilda to a higher form, Miss Honey continues to nurture her…She allows Matilda to read high-level textbooks while the rest of her class learns simple reading and math…

In this paragraph, Miss Trunchbull does not want Matilda to move onto higher-level classes. We suggest replacing “higher form” and “high-level” with the adjective “advanced.”

We also see Miss Honey’s reaction to Matilda’s problem. Miss Honey then helps Matilda. “Nurture” is a good word choice for how Miss Honey is helping Matilda. “Nurture” means to encourage and care for, especially in growing, learning and life.

The Broadway cast of "Matilda The Musical." (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Closing thoughts

In today’s report, we looked at Arunabh’s favorite character Matilda. He described her with adjectives such as “brilliant,” “resilient,” and “creative.” He used descriptive verbs and adverbs to show how other characters behave towards Matilda. We learned new words like “thus,” an adverb and “despite,” a preposition. We also learned a new idiom with the expression “go the whole hog,” which means to do something completely.

We hope that over the last few weeks, you have enjoyed learning about ways to describe your favorite character. We thank Arunabh for writing to us about Matilda! Great job!

I’m Faith Pirlo.

And I'm Jill Robbins.

Faith Pirlo wrote this lesson for VOA Learning English.

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Words in This Story

character – n. a person (or animal) who appears in a story, book, play, movie, or television show

brilliant – adj. extremely intelligent or impressive

resilient – adj. able to become healthy or strong again after something bad has happened

magical – adj. very pleasant or exciting

hog – n. another word for pig

nurture – v. to further the development of

allow – v. to permit

gerund – n. (grammar). the -ing form of a verb that acts like a noun

quotation – n. a group of words taken from a written work or speech and repeated by someone other than the writer or speaker

idiom – n. an expression in the usage of a language that is peculiar to itself either in having a meaning that cannot be derived from the conjoined meanings of its elements (such as up in the air for "undecided") or in its grammatically atypical use of words (such as give way)

advanced – adj. far along in a course of progress or development

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