New Pen Pals - Tell A Secret About Yourself

Welcome to the New Pen Pals - Tell A Secret About Yourself Swap.

I haven't been able to find the types of swaps that I would like to join, so I'm creating my own. Hopefully there are others out there looking for the same types of swaps as I am and haven't been able to find them.

For this swap you are going to write a pen pal letter to one person. Tell them about yourself, your hobbies, your likes and dislikes, whatever you like to write about in pen pal letters.

But here is the interesting part. Somewhere in your letter you are going to include a coded message telling something secret about yourself. It doesn't have to be salacious or controversial. It is more about the fun of decoding a coded message.

The code you will use is called a simple cypher. First you write your sentence to be encoded and assign each letter a number. a=1, b=2, c=3 and so on. You will also need a number for spaces, full stops, and commas.

The next step is to choose the key. This can be your favourite movie line, the first sentence in your favourite book, or your favourite song lyric. It can be any sentence you like. When you have decided on the key you assign each letter in your key a number. A=1, B=2, C=3 and so on. The key does not need to contain full stops, commas, or any other punctuation.

Then you add the number from your message with the corresponding number in the key, to get an encoded letter.

Here is an example:-

HELLO 8, 5, 12, 12, 15

Pizza 16, 9, 26, 26, 1

Add the two numbers together:- 24, 14, 38, 38, 16

To decode the message you just need to subtract the number for each letter of the key to get the uncoded number of the message.

Make sure you also tell your partner what key you are using.

Only one or two sentences of your whole letter needs to be written in this manner. Your letter can be handwritten or typed on a typewriter.

The length of the letter should be at least one side of whatever page you are writing on, but you are welcome to write more.

Above all, have fun with this.