Masha Munches on Poetic Devices

By Amalia Hoffman

Since children’s books are often read out loud to a child by adults, authors have a great opportunity to make their writing more engaging and colorful by using sounds that the child hears and repeats.

One way to enrich the story could be by weaving in some alliteration — worlds in which the first letters are repeated.

A well-known example of alliteration is:

“Peter piper picked a pack of pickled peppers.”

In my newest book, I chose the title, Masha Munching because of the letter M repeating in both words.

In designing the cover, I suggested to the graphic design team at Yeehoo Press that the letters in the world, Munching would actually look as if Masha already munched on them and she chews on the letter C

While you don’t want to flood your manuscript with alliteration, it is fun and effective to sprinkle a few here and there.

In Masha Munching, I added such combinations as, “tasty table” and “flapped his flippers and frowned”

Another way to enrich your writing and make it kid-friendly and fun is by incorporating the use of onomatopoeia. These are words that imitate sounds.

They are very popular in animal children’s books with sounds like. oink, roar, meow, chirp, ribbit, and, croak . Onomatopoeia also includes natural sound that we hear. Often, similar sounds appear in other languages. For example, the word Bottle, imitates the sound that we hear when pouring liquid. In Hebrew, the word for bottle is Bakbuk, which also imitates the same sound.

Onomatopoeia is also popular in graphic novels with sounds like, Bam, Pow, Wham etc.

Since Masha Munching is about a goat that loves to eat and sets on a culinary adventure to find fancy food, I wanted to use words that we associate with eating.

The front endpaper design is an image of sounds such as: Chomp, Munch, Burppp, Slurp, Crunch, Om, nom, nom and other sounds that later appear in the book.