How to break an unknown ciphertext - transposition of some kind I've been challenged to crack a code. All I know about it is that is was hand-enciphered, and that it is a transposition cipher of some kind. When I was given it, I started plugging it into my permutation decryption engine. As you can guess, when I realised that the ciphertext was 26 letters long, meaning permutations numbering $26!$ I stopped the program and scratched my head. What would the most efficient way to crack this be? 

Unable to find an answer, I turned to Crypto.SE. Can anybody explain an efficient way to crack the cipher?
If you know for sure that it is a transposition of some kind you can chek
the average frequency with which the various letters appear in the natural language of the plain text and then compare them to the frequencies of letters in the cyphertext. You can easily find this data on google, here is the example for english.
This method works only if the transposition of the letters is always the same, for example: letter $n$ of the ciphertext = letter $n$ of the plain text + 10.
If your key use columnar transposition you need to work out the column lengths by dividing the message length by the key length. Then you can write the message out in columns again, then re-order the columns by reforming the key word.