What is Anne Frank's writing style?

Anne Frank's writing style is conversational Dutch, set out as dated letters to an invented correspondent she calls Kitty. She writes the way a quick, argumentative fifteen-year-old talks, with everyday words and a strong sense of who is behaving unreasonably. What lifts it above a diary voice is that she edited it. In 1944 she went back through her notebooks and rewrote them for a reader she expected to meet after the war. She cut. She reordered. The entries you read have been chosen twice.

Did Anne Frank rewrite her diary?

She did, and both texts survive. From late May 1944 until her last entry on 1 August she kept the notebooks going while she copied entries onto loose sheets and reworked them there, so two manuscripts were running at the same time. The revision stopped where it did because the family was arrested on 4 August 1944 and deported. Editors call the notebooks version A and the loose sheets version B. Anne was fifteen while she worked on it, and the writer she was correcting was thirteen.

Who was Kitty in Anne Frank's diary?

Kitty was invented. Anne took the name out of Cissy van Marxveldt's Joop ter Heul novels, which she read while she was in hiding, and at first she wrote to a small circle of borrowed names, Kitty among Conny, Emmy, Pop and Marianne. By the rewrite one of them was left. Everything after the first few entries of June 1942 goes to Kitty, and the choice weighs more than it looks, because an invented friend has a fixed amount of ignorance and you have to write around it every time.

What language did Anne Frank write in?

She wrote in Dutch. Her family was Jewish and fled Frankfurt for Amsterdam in 1933, when she was four, and the Anne Frank House records that she struggled with German for the rest of her life, so the diary belongs to the language of her school and her street. You can hear that in the diction, and there is no literary grandeur in it, nothing borrowed from the shelf her parents grew up with, and every German edition you can buy is a translation of a Dutch original.

Is Anne Frank's diary a novel?

No, though she was turning it into one. The version in most bookshops was put together by her father, Otto Frank, out of the notebooks and her own revision, and he left out passages about her body along with some of the sharpest pages about her mother. Later editors restored much of it. The Definitive Edition, edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler and translated by Susan Massotty, carries material the Dutch edition of 1947 did not print. Three hands shaped the text that reaches a reader now, and two of them were hers.

Non fiction

Anne Frank Writing Style

Born June 12, 1929 – Died February 1, 1945

Analysis by Prosematter's editorial team · Updated September 6, 2026

Anne Frank rewrote her own diary into a book, and that second pass is the part a writer can borrow.

Write like Anne Frank See how editing in Prosematter works

Writing Style Overview

Writing style overview of Anne Frank: voice, themes, and technique.

Anne Frank wrote in plain spoken Dutch, in dated letters addressed to a girl who did not exist. The surface is simple to describe. A salutation at the top, short paragraphs, everyday words, and a fourteen-year-old's ear for what somebody said and how it landed in the room. It is also simple to copy badly, because the page was not left the way it fell.

In March 1944 she heard the exiled Dutch education minister Gerrit Bolkestein ask over Radio Oranje that wartime diaries and letters be kept for a public record of the occupation. On 20 May she wrote that she had started redrafting. Through that summer she copied her notebooks out onto loose sheets, cut what had gone dead, and tightened what had not.

Both manuscripts came through the war, and the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation printed them together in The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition, while the version in most people's hands is a third text again, assembled by her father out of the other two.

So the immediacy is a made effect, which is the most useful thing about it. She kept the sound of a girl talking, and on the second pass she was choosing which sentences would go on sounding that way. The Anne Frank House puts the shift plainly: "Her diary formed the basis, but 15-year-old Anne looked critically at the 13-year-old girl she had been at the beginning of the period in hiding. Much was left out or rewritten."

How to Write Like Anne Frank

Writing techniques and exercises to emulate Anne Frank.

1
Write to one person and give them a blind spot
Pick a reader, write the name at the top, and decide in one line what they do not know. They have not met your family. They were absent on Tuesday. They are perfectly capable of taking somebody else's side. Anne lifted Kitty out of a series of Dutch schoolgirl novels, so the addressee arrived with a temperament already attached, which is worth more than a blank you, much as Charlotte Bronte works the same seam in Jane Eyre every time the narrator turns aside and says "Reader." Then write the entry as a letter. You will explain things you would have skipped and skip things you would have laboured, and that reshuffling is the addressee doing your selection for you.
2
Copy it out instead of correcting it
Open a blank page and retype yesterday's entry from the top, and leave the original alone. Anne kept her notebooks running while she copied them onto loose sheets, so the first draft stayed intact and the second one had a free hand. Retyping is the part that does the work. Whatever you cannot be bothered to copy across was filler, and whatever improves under your fingers as you go was wrong before. Editing in the margin repairs words. Copying the whole thing out rebuilds paragraphs while you believe you are transcribing.
3
Put the date at the top and start in the middle
Head the entry with a date and go straight at whatever you want to say. Anne's entries skip weeks without apology, because the date has already told the reader how much time went by and she owes no bridge. Hunt through your own draft for the clause that begins "since I last wrote" or "it has been a while," and cut it out. Then look again at each opening line. If the first sentence is about the writing and not about a person, delete down to the sentence that has a person in it.
4
Rename the people in it
Give every recurring person in your draft a name they were not born with. Anne did this to each of the people in the annexe when she came to revise the diary for a reader. The gain is that you stop protecting the real person for long enough to notice what they actually do at the table, and what you notice is usually a habit rather than a quality. Start with the hardest figure in your draft, the one you have been writing around for weeks.
5
Read it back in your reader's voice
Read the finished entry aloud as the person you addressed it to, and stop wherever they would. They interrupt at the sentence that assumes knowledge they lack. They go quiet at the paragraph that flatters you. Mark both. Repair the first with a fact and the second with a deletion, and do it in that order, because the flattering paragraph often turns out to be the one holding the missing fact hostage. The pass costs ten minutes and finds things a straight reread walks past.

Anne Frank's Writing Style

Breakdown of Anne Frank's writing style: sentence structure, tone, pacing, and dialogue.

Sentence Structure

Her sentences run on coordination. And, but, because, and then, stacked in the order the thought arrived, which is how a long one still reads at speaking pace. Into that she drops interruptions: a bracket, a correction, a question fired at Kitty in the middle of a paragraph where Kitty has no business being, and the interruption is where the voice sits, because it is the place a writer stops narrating and starts thinking in front of you. Short sentences turn up where a decision has been reached, so find one of those and then look at what came directly before it, and you will usually be looking at the long coordinated sentence it was the conclusion of.

Vocabulary Complexity

Her words are the words a fifteen-year-old had to hand, and that is a decision as much as a limit, since the revision could have raised the register and declined to. Big abstract nouns do appear. Freedom, courage, character and the rest turn up often, and nearly every time one arrives it goes straight to work on a particular case, attached to a person who behaved badly or a rule that will not survive the war. Abstraction left alone goes slack within a fortnight. Anchored to the household, the same words stay hard, and you come away with a working definition of courage built out of who did the washing-up when they did not want to.

Tone

The tone changes register inside a single paragraph. A complaint about the washing-up gives way to a joke, the joke gives way to a flat statement about the war, and the flat statement gives way to a line of self-assessment in the voice of a school report. She never announces the change. Two things make the switching work. Each register lasts long enough to be recognised, and each one is fastened to an occasion, so the shifts read as a mind meeting different-sized problems in the same hour. Writers who imitate the range without the occasions get mood swings.

Pacing

Entry length is the instrument. A fortnight goes by in four lines when the fortnight resembled the one before it, and a single afternoon runs for pages when somebody said something she is still angry about. No settled measure governs it, and the irregularity is what keeps a repetitive situation readable, because you learn to read length as a signal of what mattered. The second draft sharpened this. Copying entries out gave her the chance to compress flat weeks she had first written at full length, so the rhythm you read is an edited rhythm.

Dialogue Style

Most of the talking reaches you inside Anne's own sentences. She tells you what her mother said and what Mrs van Daan said back, in her wording and at her speed, and the quotation marks come out only for the line that stung. That ratio is the technique. One quoted sentence in a paragraph of reported speech reads as the sentence the writer could not paraphrase away, so a reader treats it as verbatim and treats the surrounding summary as fair. Long literal exchanges would flatten the whole thing, since she would lose the accent that holds the household together on the page.

Descriptive Approach

Description in this book is mostly description of constraint. She tells you what the room makes people do: where each of the eight of them sleeps, which hours demand silence, who has to stand up so that somebody else can reach the window. Objects appear at the moment they become contested, so a chair, a jar, a corner of table turns visible when two people want it. The method skips scene-setting in the ordinary sense and gets further, because somebody handed the rules of a space can picture the space and the people inside it at the same time. Write the rules before you write the walls.

Signature Writing Techniques

Signature writing techniques Anne Frank uses across their work.

Event first, verdict second

Anne reports what happened and then delivers her ruling on it, one line of judgment after a short account of the facts. The order is doing something. A verdict that arrives first turns everything after it into supporting evidence, and the reader switches from following the event to checking the case, while keeping it second lets the account stay brief, because she has no need to signal significance while she narrates. The catch is that the verdict must be specific enough to argue with. Naming who was unreasonable, and on what grounds, hands the reader a position to take.

The flat inventory

She lists things. Who sleeps where, what there is to eat this week, the hours in which no tap may be run and no lavatory flushed because the warehouse below is working. The list arrives without comment, and that is what makes it land, since a reader handed a timetable calculates the confinement without being told about it. The tool is available to anybody writing about a constrained situation, and it fails in one predictable way. Annotate the list and you have written a complaint. Leave the items unglossed and let the arithmetic happen in the reader's head.

Self-conviction before the charge

Before she takes anybody else apart, she books her own vanity, her own temper and her own boredom against herself, and that is what buys the rest of her judgments a hearing. A narrator who has already convicted herself reads as somebody applying a standard. Jami Attenberg describes the memoirist's version of this in 1000 Words, where the advice she is given for her own book is to write herself as the biggest jerk in it. The difficulty is that the confession has to cost something. Admitting you are too hard on yourself is a compliment in a disguise.

The quarrel that runs for months

Three or four disputes run underneath the whole book, and she returns to them without settling any of them. Her mother. The room she has to share with Dussel. The question of who is entitled to read what she writes. Because the reader is following an argument already in progress, a new entry needs no recap, and one sentence about her mother arrives carrying everything the earlier entries put behind it. Serial continuity is cheap to build and easy to lose, and you hold on to it by refusing the tidy ending, which means writing the paragraph where you almost forgive somebody and then withholding the forgiveness.

Literary Devices Anne Frank Uses

Literary devices that define Anne Frank's style.

The diary written as letters

Each entry opens with a salutation and goes to a named correspondent, which turns a private record into a correspondence and changes what the writing owes. A letter has to place its reader before it can say anything, so Anne begins by setting you down inside the week, and a letter can also stop without resolving, because the conversation resumes tomorrow, which is why so many entries end in the middle of a quarrel. Bram Stoker built an entire novel out of the same machinery in Dracula, where journals, letters and telegrams carry the plot because every document has a recipient in mind. David Lodge, writing on the epistolary novel in The Art of Fiction, puts the mechanism this way: a letter is aimed at somebody in particular, and that reader's anticipated response conditions the discourse. A private journal has no equivalent.

The renamed household

In the rewrite the other residents stopped being neighbours and became characters with names Anne had chosen. The van Pels family turned into the Van Daans. Fritz Pfeffer, the dentist who shared her room, turned into Albert Dussel. Renaming is a small act with a large consequence, because a character can be handed a fixed set of habits and a running joke, and a real person you will see again at supper resists that. It also let her write toward publication while the people she was describing were sitting in the next chair.

The dated entry as a closed unit

The book contains no transitions. Every piece carries its date, which does the work a connecting paragraph is normally hired for, and the gap between two entries can be a day or a month with no explanation from anyone. That spares her the sentence every memoirist dreads, the one whose only job is to carry the reader from March to June. It also means the book can be opened anywhere. Woolf ran her diaries on the same principle for most of her working life, and the selection her husband published as A Writer's Diary reads as a run of dated units with no bridging in it. The price is that nothing accumulates by itself, so continuity has to come from recurring people and unfinished arguments.

Imitation Mistakes

Common imitation mistakes when copying Anne Frank.

Publishing the first pass

Raw diary prose has no proportion in it. Every day weighs the same, the argument at breakfast sits level with the news off the radio, and a reader cannot work out which one you want carried away. Anne's revision is where the proportion came from, and it is why somebody with no stake in that household can follow the entries at all. Joan Didion made the neighbouring point about her own notebooks in On Keeping a Notebook, where the entry turns out to record how something felt to her and has stopped being a record of the event. Keep the raw file. Then make a second one that knows what it is about.

Addressing the reader instead of a reader

"Dear reader" is a stage, and a writer who steps onto it starts performing. The trouble is structural. A general audience cannot misunderstand you, cannot take your sister's side, cannot already know the thing you are about to explain, so the address applies no pressure and you end up making a speech in a diary's clothes. Kitty can do all three. Anne is writing to somebody who might disagree with her, and the prose tightens under the possibility.

Being even-handed about the household

Anne is hard on her mother and harder on the woman she calls Mrs van Daan, and she does not take it back on the following page. Her judgments are the evidence. Strip them out for the sake of balance and the entries are about nothing, because a diarist, unlike a reporter, is not obliged to offer anyone a right of reply. The self-correction people admire in her arrives later and separately, and it comes as a second thought on a different date, and it works because the first thought was allowed to stand.

Playing it solemn

The imitations come out grave, and hers is a funny book, one in which she is vain about her hair, competitive about her marks, bored past bearing, and sarcastic about the adults who set the rules. Solemnity is the register the subject seems to demand, and it is the one register her prose keeps refusing, which is a large part of why the pages stay readable at the length they run. Write your worst afternoon and allow yourself to be petty in it.

Books

Explore Anne Frank's books and discover the stories that shaped their writing style and voice.

The Diary of a Young Girl
The Diary of a Young Girl

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Anne Frank's writing style and techniques.

What is Anne Frank's writing style?: Anne Frank's writing style is conversational Dutch, set out as dated letters to an invented correspondent she calls Kitty. She writes the way a quick, argumentative fifteen-year-old talks, with everyday words and a strong sense of who is behaving unreasonably. What lifts it above a diary voice is that she edited it. In 1944 she went back through her notebooks and rewrote them for a reader she expected to meet after the war. She cut. She reordered. The entries you read have been chosen twice.
Did Anne Frank rewrite her diary?: She did, and both texts survive. From late May 1944 until her last entry on 1 August she kept the notebooks going while she copied entries onto loose sheets and reworked them there, so two manuscripts were running at the same time. The revision stopped where it did because the family was arrested on 4 August 1944 and deported. Editors call the notebooks version A and the loose sheets version B. Anne was fifteen while she worked on it, and the writer she was correcting was thirteen.
Who was Kitty in Anne Frank's diary?: Kitty was invented. Anne took the name out of Cissy van Marxveldt's Joop ter Heul novels, which she read while she was in hiding, and at first she wrote to a small circle of borrowed names, Kitty among Conny, Emmy, Pop and Marianne. By the rewrite one of them was left. Everything after the first few entries of June 1942 goes to Kitty, and the choice weighs more than it looks, because an invented friend has a fixed amount of ignorance and you have to write around it every time.
What language did Anne Frank write in?: She wrote in Dutch. Her family was Jewish and fled Frankfurt for Amsterdam in 1933, when she was four, and the Anne Frank House records that she struggled with German for the rest of her life, so the diary belongs to the language of her school and her street. You can hear that in the diction, and there is no literary grandeur in it, nothing borrowed from the shelf her parents grew up with, and every German edition you can buy is a translation of a Dutch original.
Is Anne Frank's diary a novel?: No, though she was turning it into one. The version in most bookshops was put together by her father, Otto Frank, out of the notebooks and her own revision, and he left out passages about her body along with some of the sharpest pages about her mother. Later editors restored much of it. The Definitive Edition, edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler and translated by Susan Massotty, carries material the Dutch edition of 1947 did not print. Three hands shaped the text that reaches a reader now, and two of them were hers.

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