The most common constrained forms of writing are strict restrictions in vocabulary, e.g. Basic English, E-Prime, defining vocabulary for dictionaries, and other limited vocabularies for teaching English as a Second Language or to children. This is not generally what is meant by 'constrained writing' in the literary sense, which is motivated by more aesthetic concerns. For example:

• a letter (commonly e or o) is outlawed, making a lipogram;
• palindromes, such as the word "radar", read the same both ways;
• acrostics;
• reverse-lipograms (each word must contain a particular letter);
• Ander-Saxon;
• anagrams;
• aleatory (where the reader supplies a random input);
• Haiku, Japanese poem;
• Chinese poetry;
• Dui lian, Chinese couplet (對聯).