Neural Networking for Dummies

So I want to write neural network that would process N-symbol words.

Should I provide 26 symbol neurons for each letter position, so that they give 1.0 for their matching letter? Should I duplicate position for each recognized words? I.e. vocabulary of 1000 N-sized words would require 1000*N*26.

Here's the real question: why do you want to write neural network x.  Depending on the answer, there's a good chance you might be giving yourself more work than you need.