It is impossible to overestimate the power of words in The Witch of Blackbird Pond or in Puritan New England as a whole. This is seen on the artistic level, the personal level, the social/political level, and even the metaphysical level. On the artistic level, one of the first ways Kit really recognizes her connection with Nat is through their mutual appreciation of Shakespeare. When John Holbrook reads Anne Bradstreet's poetry out loud, it has a transforming effect on their social circle, as Kit suddenly recognizes the love John and Mercy share. On the personal level, Nat is deeply hurt that Kit did not tell him that William Ashby was courting her. In this community, making such matters public is an obligation and also simply good manners. This leads directly into the role of words in the social and political realms. There are established ways that things are done in Connecticut Colony, and most of them involve making explicit statements of intention. One action that marks Kit as an outsider is that she did not write ahead to ask permission to live with the Woods. Another is that Kit is willing to take words as mere words, rather than as spiritually fraught.

The Puritans, on the other hand, felt the power of words on a metaphysical level. They used the Bible not “merely” as their sacred scripture but as a guide to all of their life on earth. Knowing it, understanding it, and interpreting it was so important to them that all other written material paled in importance. This emphasis on reading and interpretation extended into the world; the Puritans read the world and human action hermeneutically—that is to say, as if it were a text in need of interpretation. There are no random acts and no meaningless acts. Instead, every action is caused and meaningful, and a major duty of the religious Puritan was making sense of even the smallest detail. This is why people like Judith Wood are so attentive to even the slightest nuance in casual conversation, why Matthew Wood sees fancy clothes not as mere decoration but as vanity and temptation, and why he and the entire community are so afraid of drama. In the Puritan mind, there should be a one-to-one relationship between word and deed, but in plays, words are spoken that are not meant to be taken seriously. As an entertainment, plays are an assault on the metaphysical underpinnings of the Puritan mind. This, then, is also why the colony is so vulnerable to contagions like the fear of witchcraft. The many things that go wrong in daily life are not mere accidents or random happenings; they are read as meaningful actions by a malicious devil, as “written” into their lives by one of his servant authors: a witch. It is only logical, in such a mind, that a piece of paper with Prudence’s name written on it repeatedly is a spell. After all, hadn’t so many of the colony’s young people just been deeply ill?