VGWrites Guidelines

VGWrites is the campus library for student writing. Stories, poems, essays, and whatever else you are working on, posted a chapter at a time for other Spartans to read.

These rules are on top of the community guidelines, which apply everywhere on the platform. Read those first.

What you can post

Writing you wrote. That is close to the whole rule.

Fiction, poetry, essays, scripts, reviews, and the assignment you were proud of are all fine. Fan fiction is fine. A work in progress you abandon after two chapters is fine, and nobody is going to hold it against you.

What is not fine:

• Writing that is not yours. Do not post someone else’s story under your name, and do not post a friend’s work without their say-so. Writing produced by an AI tool is covered in its own section below.
• Copying published work, including long passages quoted without a point. Quoting a few lines to talk about them is normal. Reposting a chapter of a published novel is not.
• Writing that is really about a real person at this school. Change the name and it is still about them, and everyone will know. If a classmate would recognize themselves as the villain, do not post it.
• Homework help disguised as a work. Posting your essay so other people can turn it in is cheating, and it gets both accounts dealt with.

Writing generated by AI

Do not post writing that an AI tool produced. Not as a work, not as a chapter, not as a contest entry, and not with a note at the top admitting it. This is a prohibition, not a disclosure rule, and tagging it does not make it allowed.

The line sits at whether the sentences are yours:

• Fine: spellcheck and grammar check. Asking a tool what a word means, whether your comma is right, or how a semicolon works.
• Fine: talking through an idea, asking for feedback on a draft you wrote, or asking what is confusing about your chapter, and then writing the fix yourself.
• Not allowed: generating prose and posting it. That covers a whole chapter, a paragraph you were stuck on, an opening line, and a description you asked a tool to write for you.
• Not allowed: pasting in your own draft and asking a tool to rewrite it, then posting what comes back. The rewrite is the tool’s sentences, not yours.
• Not allowed: an AI-generated cover image or illustration presented as your own artwork.

Some archives take the other approach and allow AI-generated work as long as it is tagged. This one does not, because it exists so students at this school can read each other’s writing and get better at their own. A library of generated text does neither, and a work you did not write teaches you nothing when somebody comments on it.

Nobody is going to accuse you over an unusual sentence. What gets acted on is a work that is obviously generated, a pattern across an account, or an author who says so. When it is unclear, you will be asked before anything happens, and the reasonable answer is to talk about your own draft, which is easy when you wrote it.

Posting AI-generated writing gets the work removed. Doing it in a contest is disqualification, and doing it repeatedly costs you posting access.

Ratings

Every work carries a rating: G, Teen, or Mature. You set it, and you are responsible for setting it honestly.

• G means anyone in the school can read it without warning.
• Teen means some language, some violence, or subject matter that a younger reader might not be ready for.
• Mature means heavy material handled seriously: violence, grief, addiction, abuse, mental illness.

Mature does not mean explicit. This is a high school platform and the ban on sexual content in the community guidelines applies at every rating. There is no rating on this platform that permits sexual content, and choosing Mature does not unlock one.

Rate up when you are unsure. A G work that should have been Teen is a problem. A Teen work that could have been G is not.

If your work deals with suicide, self-harm, or eating disorders, say so at the top of the work in your own words. You are writing for an audience of teenagers who may be going through the exact thing you are writing about. Handle it like it matters, because for somebody reading it, it does.

Chapters, drafts, and editing

A work stays a draft until you publish it, and a draft is yours alone. Nobody sees it, so use drafts freely.

Once a chapter is published it is out there. You can edit it, and you can delete it, but people may have already read it. Rewriting a chapter to say something different after readers have commented on it is bad form. Deleting a chapter that people have subscribed to is worse. If you need to pull a work down, pull it down. Do not gut it and leave the shell.

Chapters are checked for the platform’s rules after they publish, so a chapter can go live and then come down. That is normal and it is not personal.

Comments and kudos

Kudos are a way to say you liked something without having to think of words. Leave them freely.

Comments are where this gets real, so:

• Say what worked before you say what did not. Somebody put their writing in front of the whole school. That took something.
• Criticism of the writing is welcome. Criticism of the writer is not. “This chapter drags in the middle” is useful. “You cannot write” is not.
• Do not demand updates. Do not comment the same thing on twelve chapters. Do not argue with other commenters underneath somebody’s story.
• If a work is not for you, close the tab. Leaving a comment to tell an author their genre is stupid is not a review.

Authors can delete comments on their own works. If someone deletes yours, that is their call to make, and reposting it is harassment.

Contests

Staff and student editors run themed writing contests. When you enter one:

• Enter your own work, written for that contest unless the rules say otherwise.
• One entry per person unless the contest says otherwise.
• Judges’ decisions are final. Argue about it in a support ticket if you think something went wrong, not in the comments of the winning entry.

Losing a contest is not a moderation decision and there is nothing to appeal.

Reading other people’s work

You will find writing on here that is bad. Some of it will be by people you know. The right response is to say nothing, and the wrong response is to screenshot it.

Taking someone’s work off this platform to make fun of it somewhere else is harassment. It gets treated as harassment, and the fact that the work was posted publicly is not a defense.