By: Jason Shen

Puffin, a publishing company, has recently been changing Roald Dahl’s books to have fewer insults. Roald Dahl is a popular British writer who wrote many books for children.

Roald Dahl’s stories are often meant to be funny. The books have unusual characters, and gross subjects are common. In his book The Twits, for example, Mrs. Twit hides worms in Mr. Twit’s spaghetti and watches him eat it.

Many of Mr. Dahl’s stories are about children who are smarter than adults. Some adults in his books are unpleasant and treat children cruelly. The way Mr. Dahl described his characters was often extreme. He seemed to enjoy shocking his readers, and millions of young readers have enjoyed his stories.

Some people believe that some of Roald Dahl’s books could also be insulting. So Puffin, the company that publishes Dahl’s books in the UK, hired a company to change Dahl’s books so they wouldn’t contain anything insulting. In mid-February, the English newspaper the Daily Telegraph reported that Puffin had created new versions of many of Mr. Dahl’s books with hundreds of changes. For example, the word “fat” was taken out of the books. So were the words ugly and crazy. Creatures that were described as tiny are now described as small.