Thanks for checking out our monthly newsletter, where we share news and updates, provide all kinds of helpful tips, and announce the winner(s) of the previous month's contest for the best overall story of the month.
Looking for our community guidelines and tips? You can find our Treasure Trove of Tips, Reminders and Guidelines here. Or if you're looking for writing tips and help with improving your writing craft, you can find our catalog of fiction writing tips here.
Here are the topics in this newsletter:
- Topic of the Month from The Ink Well: Using Tools for Grammar Checking vs. Revision
- Winner(s) from the January Contest!
- February Contest
- Find Us on Discord
- Delegate to The Ink Well / Follow Our Curation Trail
Topic of the Month from The Ink Well: Using Tools for Grammar Checking vs. Revision
You may notice that we have been explaining in various comments on stories that you can use tools like Grammarly to find errors, but not to revise your content.
Here's why:
When you use these kinds of tools to revise and rephrase your story, it gets flagged as written by AI or assisted by AI. And we will either skip curating your story or reward it far less than we would if it was your own original content.
So please don't. Only use these tools to find and fix errors.
Let's Demonstrate with a Test!
We're going to do a full walkthrough of this process so you can see where things go wrong for many writers.
Step one: Test some content
Here are two paragraphs of a story draft, which we will check with our AI tools:
Yet she wasn’t sure how the day would unfold. What if, when the message came, it turned out to be something about not going anywhere near an airport, or public places? What if there was going to be a terrorist attack? She thought about nine-eleven. No, it was safer to see how the day was going to go. And she didn’t want to have to change plans on him. The man had enough to deal with. He was so busy.
Back in the day, she had been an account executive at a software firm in Minneapolis. She had loved her job, and she was very good at it. She wore trendy clothes, and the people on her team noticed. These days, she often thought of their lunches and happy hours. How had she lost touch with the friends she made back then? It seemed long ago now.
Test result:
Step 2: Insert errors for a Grammarly test
For this part of our test, we'll insert some grammar and spelling errors, so we can see what Grammarly suggests. Here's the same content with errors:
Yet she wasn’t sure how the day unfold. What if, when the message came, it turned out to be something about not going anywhere near an airpot, or public placed? What if there was going be a terrorist attack? She thought about nine-eleven. No, it was safer to see how the day was going go. And she didn’t want to have to change plans on him. The man had enough to deal with. He was so busy.
Back in day, she had been an account exetutive at a software firm in Minneapolis. She had love her job, and she was very good it. She wore trendy clothes, and the people on her team noticed. These days, she often thinked of their lunches and happy hours. How had she lost touch with the friends she made back then? It seemed long ago now.
Step 3: Check for errors with Grammarly
Here's a screenshot from Grammarly showing where errors are detected. Everything that is underlined should be fixed.
Step 4: Accept spelling and grammar edits
Okay let's accept the simple recommended edits from Grammarly. Here are a few examples of the recommended edits:
Here's the revised text, with simple edits accepted:
Yet she wasn’t sure how the day unfolded. What if, when the message came, it was about not going anywhere near an airport or public place? What if there was going to be a terrorist attack? She thought about nine-eleven. No, it was safer to see how the day was going to go. And she didn’t want to have to change plans on him. The man had enough to deal with. He was so busy.
Back in the day, she had been an account executive at a software firm in Minneapolis. She had loved her job, and she was very good it. She wore trendy clothes, and the people on her team noticed. These days, she often thought of their lunches and happy hours. How had she lost touch with the friends she made back then? It seemed long ago now.
As you can see, it's not much different! But after acceptance of the simple edits, there are no more underlines indicating errors.
Step 5: Test for AI again
Let's see if anything has changed. We test that content with the AI tools, and hooray — we still get a perfect report!
Step 6: Use AI assistance for the content in Quillbot
Now let's see what happens if we try using writing and rephrasing assistance.
Now we paste the content with errors (from step 2) into the Quillbot grammar check, and it pops up these options.
Step 7: Accept the grammar edits and the "Continue writing for me" option
In this test, we want to see what happens if we get more assistance from a tool than the simple spelling check. Here are the two corrected paragraphs and a new paragraph provided by Quillbot:
Yet she wasn’t sure how the day would unfold. What if, when the message came, it turned out to be something about not going anywhere near an airport or public places? What if there was going to be a terrorist attack? She thought about nine-eleven. No, it was safer to see how the day was going to go. And she didn’t want to have to change plans on him. The man had enough to deal with. He was so busy.
Back in the day, she had been an account executive at a software firm in Minneapolis. She had loved her job, and she was very good at it. She wore trendy clothes, and the people on her team noticed. These days, she often thought of their lunches and happy hours. How had she lost touch with the friends she made back then? It seemed long ago now.
The laughter shared over coffee breaks and the late-night brainstorming sessions felt like distant memories, overshadowed by deadlines and meetings. As her career flourished, she couldn’t help but notice how the warmth of those friendships began to fade, replaced by the cold reality of prioritizing professional obligations over personal connections. The joy of collaboration was often eclipsed by the demands of her role, leaving her to ponder if the sacrifices made were truly worth it.
Step 8: Test the three paragraphs in the AI test tool
Okay, let's see what results we get now from the AI test.
Boom. 100% likely AI!
Step 9: Assess what we learned
There are two important take-aways from this test.
- Do use a free online tool like Grammarly to fix errors.
- Don't use writing or revising tools like Quillbot for writing or rephrasing. They all use AI, and your content will be detected as AI generated or AI assisted.
We have been very clear that we don't allow the use of AI for writing or revising content that is posted in The Ink Well, and we will continue to tighten our rules on this, so we expect our community members to comply.
Important final note:
We recommend that you keep your original content before any editing using these tools. If your content comes up as AI-generated or AI-assisted and we decline to curate for that reason, you can supply your original content.
As always, if you have questions, please visit the "ask-theinkwell" channel in our Discord server. But note that we do not tolerate pleading or arguing with our admins.
Winner(s) from the January 2025 Contest!
Thank you to everyone who participated in our January fiction contest by writing stories for our fiction prompts throughout the month. If you submitted a story for any of our weekly fiction prompts, you were automatically entered into the monthly contest.
In addition to our winner of the month, we have selected several honorable mentions.
Our Winner!
Our top story of the month for January, 2025, winning a prize of 20 Hive is....
Long Wait.@jadams2k18, with his story,
Curator's notes:
@jadams2k18 returns to The Ink Well with a memorable piece of fiction. It is a text that crosses the line of fiction in a very subtle way and that progressively places us in a narrative of the character of wonderful literature. In the psychology of the character the long line seems to go on forever and in that eternity events happen that are recreated with a very fertile imagination. As for the execution of the writing, it is beautiful: people who die in line, people who forget why they are in line, a prodigious coffee seller, an accelerated time... The ending does not detract at all from the writing, closing the beautiful text in a theatrical way. It is a pleasure to read this writer. I read the Spanish version. I hope the English translation keeps the magic.
Congratulations, @jadams2k18!
Honorable Mentions
The following stories followed closely on the heels of our selected winner, with excellent storytelling!
- Naming to Heal@nancybriti1:
- The Row of Powers@grailent.kerb:
- Leah's Resolution@kei2:
- Stealing Her Day@zerah:
Well done, writers!
February Contest!
As a reminder, you are automatically entered into the contest of the month by writing and posting a fictional story in The Ink Well anytime throughout the month. There is no prompt for the monthly contest. So keep writing for our weekly fiction prompts and keep giving your stories your best effort!
Contest Rules
Participate in one or more of our weekly fiction prompts (or write any fictional short story in The Ink Well) before the end of the calendar month.
Post a link to your story in a comment on the prompt that inspired your story, if applicable.
Use the #fiction tag as well as the #inkwellprompt tag (if applicable) on your post.
Please remember that we have rules around violence, rape, blood, and physical abuse. See The Ink Well rules, and our article describing The Ink Well Stance on Violence.
If you have questions, please visit the "ask-theinkwell" channel in our Discord server.
At the end of the month, we will announce our winner of the month and our honorable mentions, and the winner will receive 20 Hive.
Hint: We are looking for a high-quality story. Don't rush. Remember the important skills we always talk about — great settings, good character building, strong dialog, and a good story arc that resolves well in the end.
And finally, we recommend using our tips in the article Help for the Grammatically Challenged to identify errors in your story before posting.
Good luck!
Find Us on Discord
Our Discord server is a great place to chat with other community members about the craft of writing.
Please pop into our Welcome channel, read our guidelines for conduct, and then feel free to interact with other community members or ask The Ink Well Team a question in the #ask-theinkwell channel.
Discord invitation link: https://discord.gg/Bng7mMsaQj
Delegate to The Ink Well / Follow Our Curation Trail
Want to support our community, our contests, and our rewards for great quality content? See the table below. We have made it super easy. Thank you, thank you, thank you! We have a goal to continue increasing the support we give to our wonderful, hardworking and dedicated authors!
You can follow our curation trail by going to our hive.vote curation trail page and clicking the follow button.
We welcome delegations! These support our community in many ways, including helping us to provide support to quality content creators through curation and contests.
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I'd like to emphasize this paragraph from the post, in case readers overlook it:
There is no better way to settle a conflict between AI-assisted and original issues.
To all our writers: please read this newsletter carefully. It has essential information for posting in the community going forward.
Thank you for the well-explained newsletter, let's join the February contest and see how it goes.
Thanks for the detailed explanations. Would do well to apply.
Please, can I ask which AI checker was used in the demonstration?
Wanna tell?
No, we'd rather not. 😄
It's just an invitation to some people to try to cheat or outsmart the tools, @marriot5464.
All we want is for writers to use their imaginations and write stories... you know, like in the old days before you could have a bot write for you.
Like the old days sounds better. 😊
Yay!!! Thank you very much! Very grateful for the opportunity to participate in this contest. I have long loved writing on #InkWell as it has allowed me to grow with the help of the material to improve our writing, storytelling, and editing skills.
Congratulations @jadams2k18. We enjoy your work very much!
This well explained and I hope people comply with it. Thanks for the rule anyway because many people might think that they are smarter than others...
We do hope this helps people to understand the importance of using the correct tools in the correct way and not using AI to write for them, @newbreed.
Time flies so fast since I decided to move away from Hive. The only thing I miss from this social network and blog is this place. Turns out, a lot has changed, especially since AI has penetrated this world and taken over the ecosystem in the past few years. I'm like a frozen person and find that the world has changed a lot. Luckily I can still improvise. Happy to be here. 🙏🙏🙏
https://ecency.com/hive-170798/@demmybabs/not-the-sharpest-tool-in
Thank you @theinkwell for those very detailed directions on the use of AI. Congratulations to @jadam2k18 for its winning story. Well deserved 👏👏 And also to the other writers whose stories were selected.
Thank you very much for the detailed explanation and for the mention. In my opinion, if what we want is to demonstrate our skills as writers and improve them, work on them, using a tool like A. I. is not only misleading for others, but also for ourselves. Also, the readers and the jury know about our potential. Many of us have been writing here for a long time, long before A. I. became fashionable. I. which speaks not only of our style, but also of our potential as writers. It would be, in my opinion, if we use A. I. to throw away our work, our prestige and reputation. Thanks again for the mention, I welcome it and many congratulations to @jadams2k18. Greetings and continued success
Thank you very much for everything and for explaining these details of great importance to the community.