This chapter explores how writing is used and controlled by authority, and illustrates how writing can hold social relations in place as well as challenge them – how it can channel authority as well as undermine it, and how it wields the power to regulate and persuade. Writing practices and writing spaces can be restricted in a wide variety of ways from limitations of access and availability through to legal prohibition. The examples show that who writes and what they write can be both regulated and used to regulate or influence the behaviour of others. The power of writing may convey instructions that we ignore at our peril, or may simply be a gentle encouragement to act or think in a particular way. Often the softer persuasive force of writing works to shape the way in which we see the world and how we think about our place in it.