MORE ON HANDWRITING ANALYSIS - PART II

Hi folks,

As promised, I'm writing a bit more about the subject of graphology. Hope you enjoy it.

I just realized that in signing books, I'm leaving myself wide-open to have my own handwriting analyzed... Oops...

There’s no way I can cover handwriting analysis thoroughly in a couple of posts (or even fifty posts!), but I’ll try to give some of the major points. Again, I’d highly recommend Andrea McNichol’s HANDWRITING ANALYSIS: Putting It to Work for You for a broad view and a starting point. It’s a marvelous book and will give you a great introduction to the science of graphology and it’s just plain entertaining!

Just a few of the things a handwriting analysis can reveal about the writer are:

1. Drug use

2. Cheating

3. Criminal behavior

4. Health or the presence of disease

5. Which potential mate is more considerate

6. Who cheated his customer

7. Who’s lying about his age

8. Who is liable to cheat with numbers, such as accountants and bookkeepers.

9. Level of intelligence

10. Strong vs weak work drive

11. Extroversion vs introversion

13. Who has more energy

14. Who’s more reliable and predictable

15. Which person wants a divorce

16. Which person is a convicted killer

17. Who is more aggressive and who is less aggressive

18. Who is more depressed and who is happier

19. Who tends toward the emotional side of their personality than the intellectual and vice versa

20. Who is narrow-minded

21. Who holds back his/her feelings

22. Who feels more economical

23. Who ventures out more

24. Who’s more organized

25. Who thinks more about the future? About the present? About the past?

26. Who feels defensive and has something to hide

27. Who’s more reliable and predictable
Many, many more!

In short, just about everything to do with a person’s personality and nature!

Here’s what Carl Jung said about handwriting analysis:

No one can get out of his own skin. We act as our psychological past, i.e., as our cerebral organization dictates. For this reason, we are bound to expose ourselves in exactly the same way as we do in our own handwriting.

Graphology is the study of all graphic movement. It’s not simply “handwriting analysis.” It’s not our hand or our toes or our mouth (in the case of those who’ve lost limbs and relearned how to write) that decide how we’ll write and make our marks on paper. Those decisions come from our minds and are actually “brain writing.” Those brain prints reveal who we are—how we think, feel and behave. Although our moods may change, part of our handwriting will always remain the same, just as part of you always remains the same.

A very telling study of a group of juvenile delinquents was conducted in which the kids were asked to substitute positive handwriting traits in place of their negative traits and their antisocial behavior were significantly changed to more social behavior.

There are three aspects of human beings that are reflected in graphology, the physical, the mental, and the emotional. The physical aspects revealed are our identities, the state of our physical health, and the presence of drugs, alcohol or other foreign substances in our bodies. Mental aspects revealed are our intelligence and aptitudes. Emotional aspects that can be determined from our handwriting are how we think, feel and behave.

Some interesting facts:

1. The slant of your letters reveals the degree to which you express your real emotional feelings to others. It doesn’t say to what degree you have feelings, but to what degree you’ll express them to others. Slanting to the right is to express your real emotional feelings—to be demonstrative, affectionate, passionate. A right slant also indicates a person oriented toward the future. About 70% of American adults have a rightward slant their whole lives.

A vertical slant is a person suppressing their real emotional feelings. It’s the slant associated with diplomacy in that you neither express nor repress your feelings—you stay on top of things. It means “head over heart” or thinking rather than feeling and it also indicates a person more oriented toward the present.

A leftward slant indicates a person who represses their real emotional feelings. To think one thing but say another, to lean over backwards to avoid emotional situations. Such a slant is associated with those who do first and last what’s best for themselves alone, who are overly materialistic and overly concerned with outward appearances. It also means a person oriented toward the past.

It may help to picture slant as a person standing. What does the person leaning toward you indicate? The person standing straight up? The person leaning back from you?

There can often be different slants within the same writing sample or even within the same sentence. This is very telling and I don’t have space here to show all the things this indicates.

An interesting case study is looking at a sample of Jackie Kennedy’s handwriting shortly after Jack Kennedy’s assassination. It has a decided left slant. It indicates a writer that, at the time, was “cold, reserved, indecisive, not straightforward, masks feelings, hard to fathom, difficult to get along with. Her personal pronoun I (a very revealing word) has an even more pronounced left slant. Also, her signature (also very revealing) is at a distance from the body of the letter examined, indicating a person who is disassociating herself from what she just wrote. The actual note read: “I should have known that it was asking too much to dream that I might have grown old with him.” When her husband was assassinated, reporters reported that Jackie “showed no emotion whatsoever. You wanted her to cry, to do something, but… nothing. That’s typical of a leftward slanter. She also had another characteristic in that sample—a feature called “clubbed stroking.” It’s a feature that usually indicates the potential for cruelty.

About 70% of Americans write with a rightward slant, 5% with a vertical, 15% with a leftward slant, and 10% with an unstable slant. A high percentage of teenagers, especially girls, will experiment with a backwarded slant. At the time of this experimentation, the teenager may be experiencing unhappy or rebellious feelings. A very high percentage of gourmet chefs exhibit a rightward slant. They’re very emotional about their work!

There are traits associated with individual letters. One seen at times is the “maniacal d.” That’s a small-case “d” that unexpectedly slants far to the right. It indicates… you guessed it… maniacal behavior. What it actually indicates is a loss of control over hand movement to the right, indicative of loss of mental and emotional control. This is a person who is suddenly pulled off balance, and out of emotional control, prone to explosive behavior. The further rightward these d’s or other letters lean, the more the writer is at the mercy of his emotional outbursts. And the more frequently these Maniac d’s appear, the more often the writer goes off the emotional deep end. This is a trait that quite often shows up in the writing of many of the most notorious murderers of our time. Andrea shows an example of this in Steve Grogan’s writing, a member of the Charles Manson family. It’s in Lee Harvey Oswald’s script and many others, including the Zodiac killer.

Nearly perfect writing may also be a sign of emotional stress. When writing is too pretty, too perfect, too tight, everything alike as though it had been produced by a typewriter, it means the writer is compensating for an inner feeling of loss of control. These writers are often one step away from cracking up. This type of writer, at this period of their lives, often put rulers under their writing, and are people who write too mechanically. Many go along in life, seemingly handling everything until, boom! They lose control and go berserk. Again, as I said in the first post of this subject, at times this is job-created, particularly among elementary teachers and especially during the time they are teaching cursive writing to their students.

A sign of above-average intelligence is a writer who combines print and cursive and observers may remark that it looks “sloppy.” This is a positive sign, unless it is so sloppy as to be unintelligible, and then it becomes a negative sign, indicating a person who doesn’t really wish to communicate clearly. Extremes of any trait can indicate a negative, rather than a positive trait.

Beware the accountant who writes down numbers that are hard to make out! There’s a reason they do this and they’re usually unaware that they do… or they’d change so they didn’t get caught…

There are dozens and dozens of traits that an analyst uses to determine the writer’s personality and predict behavior from. No one trait by itself is reliable. It’s also important to take several samples, written at different periods, if possible, to get the most accurate assessment.

I hope I’ve whetted your appetite a bit to find out more about this fascinating science. Again, I’d highly recommend Andrea McNichol’s book to begin with.

Just don’t have your novel’s detective characters saying they can tell a writer’s age, sex or if they’re left-or right-handed!