the Gruffalo for the first time, saying "Oh, help! Oh, no! It's a gruffalo". To create a satisfying rhyming scheme for the story, Donaldson tried a few different names for the creature that would eventually become the Gruffalo. In Burke's view, the name is "fittingly crafted by the author". The use of the Gr sound at the start of the name evokes negativity, harshness and discomfort, owing to the fact that it is a common consonant cluster in words with that connotation (for example: growl, groan, grumble). The first syllable in the name—gruff—is shared with the other children's literary characters of the Three Billy Goats Gruff. The sound of the word "Gruffalo" is used to emphasise the first time the Gruffalo is seen in the story: the mouse begins saying the sentence "Silly old snake, doesn't he know, there's no such thing as a Gruffal ...", then the reader turns the page to see the picture of the Gruffalo and the mouse finishes it's sentence with an the exclamation "Oh!". Burke writes that this exclamation works particularly well when the text is read out loud. Van der Westhuizen writes that there is some "very subtle wordplay/manipulation of spelling" when the real Gruffalo is first introduced to make him "more specific, more substantial": from that point on in the text, "Gruffalo" is spelled with a capital 'G'; up until in the story, it was spelled with a lower case 'g'. There is typographic variation in the text, in that the Gruffalo's and predator's dialogue is written in italic font whereas the mouse's dialogue is not. The text contains a mixture of predictable rhymes (such as mouse-house and wood-good) and unpredictable rhymes (such as toowhoo-flew). It utilises alliteration from the very start (such as "deep, dark woods" in the opening line), which gives more emphasis to the descriptions and helps children remember them easier. The word "terrible" is repeated as an adjective to describe the Gruffalo's features (for example "terrible tusks", "terrible claws"), which Burke writes may remind readers of Where the Wild Things Are—another children's book to use the word. The Gruffalo mainly uses concrete nouns (such as "lake" and "wood") rather than abstract nouns. Illustrations The Gruffalo When writing the story, Donaldson did not have an exact vision of what the Gruffalo would look like. She said that she imagined he would be "more weird and less furry" than Scheffler's