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Secret Ways to Write

Whether you're starting a secret club or just want to practice your spy skills, secret writing can be a lot of fun and a good mental exercise as well. Some of the major methods of secret writing include ciphers that need to be decoded and physically hidden or jumbled messages that need to be transformed to be read.

Substitution Cipher
- In a substitution cipher, each letter in the real message, or plaintext, is represented by a different letter or symbol in the coded message, or ciphertext. The simplest substitution ciphers rearrange the letters in the alphabet to create a key that the sender and receiver of the ciphertext both know, such as A=G, B=T and C=W. Another basic substitution cipher is formed by creating two tic-tac-toe patterns and two large X's, then filling in the spaces with letters. The angled shapes each letter occupies (with or without a dot, to distinguish between identical shapes) represents the letter.
Transposition Cipher
- While a substitution cipher depends on switching out individual letters, a transposition cipher depends on rearranging the order of letters according to a predetermined pattern. One transposition cipher involves writing the plaintext in a rectangular grid, with the same number of letters in every row, then creating a ciphertext by writing out the columns of the grid as if they are words. Someone who knows the dimensions of the original rectangle can decipher the text by writing it in columns and then reading across the rows.
Invisible Ink
- To add another layer or different style of security to your message, you can use invisible ink. There are many forms of homemade or commercial invisible inks available, but lemon juice is one of the easiest to use. Simply write a secret message in lemon juice using cotton swabs and allow it to dry completely. You can reveal the message by warming it carefully over a light bulb, which will cause the message to turn brown.
Physical Rearrangement
- Another form that transposition ciphers can take is the physical rearrangement of the plaintext to create an illegible, nonsensical or innocuous set of markings. One way to do this is to wrap a narrow strip of paper around a rod or tube in a tight spiral, then write the plaintext down the sides of the rod. When you unwrap the strip of paper, it should contain an illegible message. Someone with a rod of the same size, however, can wrap the strip around it to make it readable again.

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