How to Study Handwriting

Handwriting is like an art form. The way your handwriting looks tells something about you. Graphology, or handwriting analysis, can provide useful clues about someone’s personality. This study is a kind of astrology and those who follow it closely believe your handwriting can tell more about a human being than any psychological test. When studying a handwritten sample, the graphologist should consider the writer’s use of space as well as the appearance of the letters in a word.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Get a sample by asking someone to write a passage (at least three sentences) on an unlined page. The writer should take no longer than one minute to finish this task.

2. Identify how the writer handles the three zones in handwriting: upper, middle, and lower. The upper zone attends to the tall letters; the middle, the round letters; the lower, the letters that extend downward. The balance between these three zones reveals different things about the writer. The upper zone symbolizes one’s mental and spiritual life. Someone whose handwriting has very tall letters tends to be an intellectual person. The middle zone represents the everyday and how a person sees him/herself in relation to others. People with very round letters that have little difference in height tend to be self-centered and immature. This trait is common in teenagers’ handwriting. Finally, the lower zone stands for one’s physical nature. Athletes and other physical types often write with pronounced lower zones.

3. Take a look at the use of space on the page. Most writers will have an innate sense of right and left margins. The right symbolizes the future and the left represents the past. Leaving a narrow right margin suggests a risk-taking person who is unafraid of the future. A narrow left margin implies the writer is tied to the past and maybe even fearful of moving on.

4. Determine how the writing moves across the page. Without lines to write on, most writing moves up or down rather than straight across the page. Writing that moves up the page indicates a writer who is feeling good or optimistic, and down suggests the writer is feeling bad, tired or depressed.

5. Look closely at the space between words and lines as well. People who leave relatively little space between words likely require other people’s company. They are needier, more insecure and are considered “joiners” who need attention. Writers who leave more space may be hard to get close to. They tend to be more independent and better at grasping the “big picture.”

Tips & Warnings

• While these interpretations are generally accepted concepts of graphology, no single characteristic in writing is significant by itself. Graphologists often need to look at handwriting in context. They should focus on the overall handwriting aesthetic rather than the slight details, like how a writers dots his "i's" or crosses her "t's."

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