Writing Revelations

Have you ever tried to fake someone’s signature? Have you ever thought about what your handwriting says about you and the secrets you might be hiding? Have you ever wondered why kidnappers – at least in the movies — use cut-out letters from magazines and newspapers to write ransom notes?

Well, I have. For a while now.

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I was in the third grade at St. Agatha when my class first started writing in cursive. It’s funny because it wasn’t until the fifth grade that we actually had an official penmanship class where we learned what I think was the Palmer Method of cursive writing. Since we had been using “script” for two years, I imagine that all of us had developed some pretty bad habits by the time we learned how to write properly.

In the class the teacher had us practice random sets of letters at a time, so each kid had to master one set of letters before he or she could advance to a second set of letters. I never got past the small case “r”s. That is not to say I made it through three-fourths of the alphabet. Far from it. The letter selections were not in alphabetical order and I hadn’t even started on capital letters before the class seemed to end abruptly at the end of the school year.

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Every year, St. Agatha sponsored a science fair for seventh and eighth graders. In the seventh grade I chose what even then I considered to be a very lame project. I had no one to blame but myself. We were not given a list of science projects to choose from. I thought up my stellar project all on my own. “Does Polluted Water Evaporate More Slowly than Clean Water?” I mean, really. Who cares?

So, at science fair time the next year, I was determined to choose a subject that actually interested me. The scientific question I attempted to answer: “Can you tell someone’s personality from their handwriting?” I don’t know where the idea came from, but I soon learned that graphology had been studied for centuries. Graphology is the study of a person’s handwriting to determine the writer’s personality and behavior.

I went to the library and checked out the few books I could find on graphology and handwriting analysis. Some of the books contained specific handwriting characteristics and what they supposedly meant in regard to the writer’s personality traits. I was set.

My hypothesis was that yes, you could determine a person’s personality traits by studying his or her handwriting. And I was going to prove it.

I chose a handful of classmates to participate in my study. Two of my “subjects” were Bill and Joanie. I chose these two because of their distinct handwriting styles. Bill was left-handed and he typically wrote with a soft-leaded pencil. His writing was thick, dark, slanted backwards and messy looking. (Due, in part, because, being left-handed, his forearm would rub against his paper as he wrote.) On the other end of the spectrum was Joanie, whose handwriting was precise, neat and seemingly perfect.

I asked each of my subjects to provide a writing sample on a sheet of unlined paper. After obtaining the samples, I set about “interviewing” my subjects to learn more about their personalities. My scientific method was questionable, at best. I didn’t interview my subjects individually. Instead, and really based on my not wanting to interview each person individually, I organized a group interview. I needed the help of my other subjects’ far-from-objective eighth grade opinions to help me determine the personality traits of each of the others.

Bill, by far, had the worst writing of all my subjects. I wasn’t concerned about hurting his feelings when I had to tell him his handwriting suggested he was a sloppy person – because he was a boy. On the other hand, I wasn’t as forthright with my female subjects. I didn’t want to reveal anything unsavory about them and hurt their feelings.

In all cases, I basically performed a half-assed analysis of their handwriting based on just a few “identifiers” that I was able to pull from a few random books. My entire methodology was decidedly deficient.

Which is not to say that I got a bad grade on my project. The science fair judges must have based their assessment, not on my scientific method, but on my charming personality because my project was rated “Superior” and I advanced to the district finals. In all likelihood it was because the judges found my topic so interesting. At the district level my project earned an “Excellent” which was not high enough to propel me to the state level.

At any rate, graphology remained an interest of mine and I wanted to learn more about different handwriting markers and what they revealed about a writer’s personality.

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Enough of an interest that when I moved to California twenty years later, I looked up “handwriting analysis” on the Internet, became a member of Handwriting Analysis of America, subscribed to a quarterly graphology newsletter and, believe it or not, enrolled in a nine-month training course in handwriting analysis.

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The theory behind handwriting analysis is that a person learns to write cursive in a certain way. In America, there have been only a few handwriting styles that have become standards. Over time, a person incorporates different short cuts in their writing. In reviewing someone’s writing, an analyst looks at how a person’s current handwriting differs from the cursive form he or she learned. Each of the identified differences signifies a particular personality trait of the writer. Everyone’s handwriting is unique because virtually no one’s writing looks exactly like the cursive they were taught. In addition, though a person’s letter forms may appear the same as another person, characteristics like the pressure the writer uses, the slope of the writing on unlined paper, also provide clues to a person’s personality.

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My graphology course was held in San Francisco on Wednesday evenings. I had already started working at the Monterey County Medical Society when the course began, so every Wednesday for nine months, I’d take off early from work and make my two-hour trek to San Francisco. Each class started at 6:00 pm and was three hours long. My instructor’s name was Ted and the classes were held in his home. I was committed. And gutsy.

Looking back, I’m really surprised at how brave I was. Enrolling in the class was one thing, but I had the nerve to actually drive to a stranger’s home, in a strange city, at night. On top of that, available on-street parking near Ted’s house was extremely scarce, street lighting was limited, and Ted’s home had no signage indicating that a course was being held there. The first night, I was not without fear. Especially for an introvert like me. I admit that I waited in my car for quite a while, looking for anyone else who may have enrolled in the same class. I didn’t see a soul. Eventually, I got out of my car and approached the strange door. And I knocked.

And I was not murdered, which is good.

After that first night, my only grievance besides the amount of time it took to get to San Francisco during rush hour, was parking. On-street parallel parking was the only option and it was hard to come by. You had to time your arrival at Ted’s just right in order to get a spot. Parallel parking has never been my strong suit and doing it on a very steep incline required a skill set I did not have. (Luckily, after my first class, I started sharing rides with another student who worked just north of me. Though we alternated driving, I always had her do the parking.)

That first night, Ted had a female friend of his analyze a sample of each of the student’s handwriting. If anyone didn’t pass the analysis – if one’s writing showed traits of obstructionism or dishonesty – he was given a refund and booted from the class before it even started.

Ted was a certified handwriting analyst and a professional document examiner. He was probably in his 50s, was tall and somewhat unkempt, kind of like he’d slept in his clothes. He struck me as an opinionated yet free spirited product of the sixties.

Though related, graphology and document examination are two different activities. While handwriting analysis attempts to discern personality traits, document examination is used only to determine the authenticity of signatures and written documents but disregards the personality of the writer.

One night, Ted told the ten-or-so people in the class about how his testifying as a document examiner helped get an armed robber convicted. The robber had gone to the cashier at a convenience store and handed her a handwritten note saying something like, “I have a gun; give me all your money.” The man got the cash and left the store, leaving his note behind.  The police later found the suspect who denied everything. Ted was hired by the prosecutor to examine the note and compare it to a sample of the suspect’s writing. Of course, when the police asked the suspect for a writing sample, the suspect tried to alter his handwriting to make it look different. Unfortunately for the bad guy, everyone suspected he would do this, so they went about trying to find an older sample of the suspect’s writing. And, sure enough, Ted analyzed the handwriting samples and testified at trial that the two writing samples were made by the same person. Case closed. Court is adjourned.

I was learning a lot from my handwriting class, but I had no interest in building my credentials as a document examiner. The last thing I’d ever want to do is testify in court for a living.

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It’s 1998. I am the executive director of the Monterey County Medical Society. MCMS is a non-profit professional association of and for physicians. Think local American Medical Association. Like other membership associations, MCMS is always trying to identify and offer new and valuable benefits to its member physicians. I am currently enrolled in Ted’s class. One day at work, one of my physician members confides in me that he had had to fire his office manager because she had been embezzling from him. An idea began to form in my mind. Dishonest employees. Handwriting analysis. Member benefit. What if I were to analyze the handwriting of prospective employees of medical practices, to determine if they were honest and hardworking? We could offer the service as a benefit of membership in MCMS. I couldn’t think of a more brilliant idea!

But before I can recommend the service to my board members, I had better test it myself. By serendipity, my membership director had recently submitted her resignation and I need to hire her replacement. I advertise the position online and obtain several resumes. Most of them are useless to me. Applicants either want salaries higher than the position warrants or they have no relevant experience.  I narrow the list down to three candidates to invite in for an interview. My selection of candidates is further whittled down when one of the three doesn’t show up for her interview. I am pretty desperate to hire someone, and I pray that one of the two candidates left will be acceptable.

During their respective interviews, I have each of them write a brief paragraph on unlined paper. I am going to look at their handwriting only as an additional tool in my selection process, not as a decision-maker. One of the candidates stands out above the other – because she was on time –and I hire her. Her name is Kim. I think I’ve hired someone whom I can groom to take over my job in a few years.

We’re three months in and I take the medical society staff out to lunch. There are just three of us: Kim, Rosa and me. To start a conversation, I decide to ask both Kim and Rosa what they’d like to be doing in five years. I know, lame, right? Typical interview question. And yet I am soon to discover that I must not have asked this standard interview question in Kim’s interview.

I ask Kim first. “What do you want to be doing in five years, Kim?”

Her reply is immediate. Kim obviously knows exactly where she wants to be in five years.

“I want to live on a ranch and be a sheep herder.”

What the hell?

When I reviewed her handwriting, I had been looking for clues indicating honesty versus deception, hard-working versus lazy, leader versus follower. It never even occurred to me to find out if the candidate was more suitable for working in an office or on a farm!

Studies show that personality is the leading factor in job success – not education, experience, age, race or gender. It’s most important that you hire the right personality for the job you’re trying to fill. With Kim, I obviously wasn’t looking for enough of the right personality traits. She quit a year later. The fact that I hired Kim even after I “analyzed” her handwriting leads me to believe that I might just suck at being a handwriting analyst.

I opted not to propose a handwriting analysis service as a member benefit to my board of directors.

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AFTERTHOUGHTS:

With the advent of keyboards, texting, electronic signatures, and emojis, handwriting itself has become a lost art form. It didn’t help that in 2010, college and career-readiness standards – including the Common Core standards — did not include the skill of handwriting. As a result, many states stopped requiring handwriting education in their schools.

But why should handwriting be part of the curriculum? Learning to write in cursive introduces a rhythmic activity that enhances motor neurons, contributing to cognitive skills like decision making, attention and sensory processes. Studies have shown that the fine motor skills used in cursive writing are related to academic achievement in reading, writing and math.

Beginning in 2016, more parents and educators started demanding that handwriting be brought back to elementary school education. As a result, as of 2019, 25 states mandate teaching penmanship in elementary school; another five had legislation pending. Most states that don’t mandate teaching cursive still allow schools and districts to teach it if they want.

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Remember how signatures mattered when you made credit card purchases? I remember using my mom’s Lazarus card or Master Charge (with her permission, of course) and worrying that they would be able to tell that my signature was different than my mom’s signature on the back of her card. As a credit card holder, myself, I had always assumed that if someone used my credit card fraudulently, I could argue that I had not made a purchase because the signature on the receipt was not mine. Unfortunately, I don’t think that ever was the case. So why have they always insisted on signatures when a person is making an in-person purchase?

Then they advanced to requesting electronic signatures which, if they were ever checking for validity, is quite a joke. The signature I make on an electronic screen at the grocery store never looks like my actual signature. Especially since I’m usually brandishing the stylus pen like a paintbrush. And if I use my thumb as my writing instrument, my signature is even more unrecognizable. Now, Target and my grocery store don’t require a signature at all. Target asks for my four-digit PIN and the grocery store asks for my phone number. Online purchases don’t even require a password. Even signatures have become obsolete!

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Graphology has been around for centuries. The first known book on graphology was authored by Camillo Baldi, an Italian doctor of both medicine and philosophy, and published in 1622. And for hundreds of years before that, Chinese scholars had known that the way a person wrote revealed his character.

The term “graphology” was coined by Frenchman Jean Michon in the 1870s. His published research is still required reading for graphology students.

Handwriting analysis became very popular in Europe and many leading universities began offering advanced degrees in graphology through their psychology departments. The greatest advancement of graphology as a study has been since psychology became a profession.

Though most research in graphology has been in Europe, it was the American-based Handwriting Research Corporation’s research team that modernized graphology by introducing computer technology and creating an even more reliable and accurate handwriting analysis process.

In America, there are an estimated 5,000 corporations using handwriting analysis in some capacity, while in In France and Switzerland, approximately 80-percent of large corporations use graphology in their hiring practices.

Today, there are more than 20,000 certified graphologists in the United States.