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Analyze This: A Totally Unscientific Guide to Handwriting Science

Kimberly Shrack

Here’s my analysis. Fanciful? Yes. Materialistic? Tell that to my two pairs of jeans.

I am, and have always been, a detective story junkie. When I was a kid, I used to scour yard sales for old Clue books (you’d be surprised how often they popped up). My favorite movie was The Great Mouse Detective. Even today, 90% of the books I read are whodunits (case in point: currently reading Ruth Ware’s One by One, a modern homage to And Then There Were None by the whodunnit queen herself, Agatha Christie). In my residual self image, I’m wearing a deerstalker hat and puffing on a pipe. Point is, I’m actually a super sleuth trapped in the body of a calligrapher… and perhaps that’s why I find graphology so crazy fascinating.

According to graphology, (which is just a fancy way of saying handwriting analysis), you can tell a whole lot about a person’s personality, mood and motives just by studying their handwriting. It’s worth mentioning up front that a lot of people consider graphology to be a pseudoscience… but that hasn’t stopped police departments all over the world from calling in graphologists to help in cases where notes are involved. So how does it work?

I recently read a book called Sex, Lies and Handwriting (I mean, seriously, how great is that title?) by Michelle Dresbold, one of the country’s top handwriting identification experts. She explained that your handwriting actually has very little to do with our hands; instead, it comes from our brains. Our brains determine the size, shape and slant of our words. The logic goes that because these patterns come from the brain, we can use them to interpret the psyche of the writer. Pretty cool, huh?

So that begs the question… what does YOUR handwriting say about YOU? Now before we dive into specifics, let’s get your handwriting sample. Grab a pen and piece of blank, unlined paper and write your signature and this phrase: “the quick brown fox jump over the lazy dog.” Done? Excellent. Scroll down and prepare to be analyzed.* 

*Remember, I am not -- repeat NOT -- a scientist or psychologist. None of this should be taken seriously -- just for funsies!

So, whaddya think? Was the analysis pretty spot on? Or waaaaay off? Let me know in the comments below! Want to see my analysis? Head over to Instagram!

And oh, in case you’re interested in learning more about the super interesting world of graphology, you can check out the sources I used below. Happy scripting!

Sources