Editorial
Editorial policy
How the guides are researched and edited, where the example poems come from, where AI is used and where it is not, and how advertising is kept away from the writing.
Last updated 27 July 2026
This page explains how the guides on this site are made, what we will and will not publish, and — because the site is built around a language model — exactly where artificial intelligence is involved and where it is not. It exists so you can judge how much to trust what you read here.
What we are trying to do
Most writing about acrostic poems online says the same three things: here is the definition, here is an example, here are some adjectives beginning with each letter. It is accurate and it is useless, because it does not help anyone write a poem they would want to give to someone.
Everything here is written against that. Three working rules:
- Say something specific or say nothing. If a section could appear unchanged on any other site about acrostics, it gets cut.
- Show the working. Where we make a claim about what works — that unrhymed acrostics beat rhymed ones, that hard letters should be treated as opportunities — we demonstrate it with a before-and-after rather than asserting it.
- Prefer the harder honest answer. The guides repeatedly tell readers they do not need the generator, because that is true.
The poems
Every example poem on this site was written for this site. None of them is taken from a book, an anthology, another website, or a user's session with the generator.
We do not reproduce copyrighted poetry. Where a famous acrostic is discussed — Lewis Carroll's, Edgar Allan Poe's, the alphabetic Psalms — the page describes what the poem does and links to a public-domain source such as Project Gutenberg, the Poetry Foundation or the Academy of American Poets so you can read the original in full at its home. That is better for you and fairer to the people who maintain those archives.
Where AI is used, and where it is not
The site would be dishonest to be coy about this, so:
- The generator is a language model. Obviously. That is the product. Poems it writes for you are machine-written, generated fresh for each request, and not drawn from a stored library.
- The guides are drafted with AI assistance and edited by a human before publication. Structure, argument, claims and example poems are checked line by line. Nothing is published unread.
- Factual and historical claims are verified against primary or authoritative sources — Project Gutenberg, the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, standard reference works — and those sources are linked from the page so you can check them yourself. Where a claim is disputed or a story is well-known-but-probably-embellished, the page says so.
- Every acrostic printed in the guides is checked letter by letter. A poem that does not spell its own word is the one unforgivable error on a site like this.
If you find an error
Tell us and it gets fixed, with the page's update date changed. Contact page. Corrections are the cheapest quality control there is and we would rather hear it from you than not hear it at all.
Advertising and independence
The site is funded by advertising through Google AdSense, and by nothing else. Specifically:
- No guide on this site is sponsored, paid for, or written at anyone's request.
- We do not sell links, accept guest posts, or run affiliate links.
- Advertisers have no influence over what is published and no advance sight of it.
- Outbound links go to public-domain archives and poetry organisations. None of them pays us; several of them would be startled to learn we exist.
- Ads are kept out of the generator itself. Nothing sits between you and your poem.
If any of that ever changes — a sponsored guide, an affiliate arrangement — it will be labelled on the page it affects, at the top, in plain words.
Corrections and updates
Every guide carries an update date. When we make a substantive change — a corrected fact, a rewritten section — that date changes. Small typographic fixes do not trigger a date change.
If a correction is significant enough that someone might have acted on the wrong version, we say what changed at the foot of the page rather than quietly replacing it.
What we do not cover
This is a site about one poetic form. It does not offer advice on publishing, run a submissions process, review books, or grade anyone's work. If you want somewhere to send a poem, the poetry organisations linked throughout the guides are the right starting point — not us.