An acrostic is a good type of poem for new poets. It doesn’t need to rhyme nor consist of full sentences, and it can be about almost anything or anyone you’d like to write about. Its defining feature is that it spells the name of its subject vertically using one letter from each of its lines, usually the first.

Acrostics are informal but personal poems based on their writers’ thoughts and feelings. You won’t find many, if any, acrostics in collections of world-renowned poems, but that doesn’t make them not worth writing; on the contrary, their personal nature can make them especially meaningful to their writers—and in the case of acrostics written about other people, to the people they’re about.

To get started writing an acrostic, choose a subject—whom or what your acrostic will be about. Here are some ideas to get you started:

  1. Yourself, a friend, a family member, or a pet.
  2. An activity you like (e.g., reading) or something related to that activity (e.g., books).
  3. A holiday (e.g., Christmas, Easter).

Now that you’ve picked your subject, brainstorm! How do you feel about your subject? What do you know about your subject? What do you want other people to know about your subject? Write your ideas down so you can use them to help you write your poem.

Next, write the name of your subject downward, letter by letter. Use capital letters at the start of each line to make your subject stand out. See my example below:

J
A
C
K

Now you’re ready to write your poem. Below is the finished poem from the example above:

Jumping with enthusiasm!
Always begging for treats...
Covered in fluffy yellow fur!
Keen and loyal guardian of his household.

Can you tell that that acrostic I wrote is about my dog Jack? Here’s another example I’ve written for you, this time about golf:

Gentle
Outdoor
Lifelong
Fun!

Notice that each line in this second acrostic contains only one word. Such makes for short poems and is good for subjects with long names.

One more type of acrostic to cover is the kind that has its subject’s name centred in text. This is trickier to create than a standard acrostic and has some specific requirements: assuming you’re typing it, you need to type it in a monospaced font, use centre alignment, do something to make each letter of its subject’s name stand out (such as make them bold), and add blank spaces to the left side of each line as needed to centre its subject’s name. Here’s an example I’ve written:

comforting
  enlivening
       awakening

You can tell that the above acrostic is about tea since tea is bold and centred perfectly in the poem’s text.

That should be all you need to know to write an acrostic, so go try it!