"dreadful suffering" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It is used to express intense pain, anguish, or hardship. For example, "The refugees endured dreadful suffering during their exodus from their homeland."
The dreadful suffering in World War II demonstrated the need for a new Europe.
In the midst of dreadful suffering the child-Equiano asserts the magical beauty of life.
The hero of the piece, however, is not Dreyfus, who despite his dreadful suffering, is a minor and not particularly sympathetic character.
The young women rescued from Isis who testified in Birmingham schools last week about their dreadful suffering show the way to make such propaganda truly effective.
There may also be a deeper and more disturbing lesson to be drawn from the absence of protest about the way the Allies waged the war in Europe, even though that way caused dreadful suffering among the liberated people.
"This doctor has condemned my sister to a year, so far, of terrible suffering and a death which is too dreadful to contemplate, when she could have been completely cured.
When Evans reached the supply depot ahead of Scott, he was in a dreadful condition, suffering from scurvy and the bitter disappointment of being ordered back short of the pole by Scott.
The 12th century historian William of Malmesbury records the story of a woman who, upon hearing a jackdaw chattering "more loudly than usual," grew pale and became fearful of suffering a "dreadful calamity", and that "while yet speaking, the messenger of her misfortunes arrived".
It should, however, be said and said loudly that the primary justification for regime change in Iraq is the dreadful and prolonged suffering of the Iraqi people, and that the remote possibility of a future attack on America by Iraqi weapons is of secondary importance.
Not only that, but even people who have been kept in dreadful conditions, kidnapped, say, suffering pain and humiliation for years, can feel very ambivalent about being free.
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley took pains that readers' sympathies would lie not only with Frankenstein, whose suffering is dreadful, but also with the creature, whose suffering is worse.
