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Graphology - the study of handwriting and handwriting analysis - is now an accepted and increasingly used technique for assessment of people in organizations. Handwriting analysis is an effective and reliable indicator of personality and behaviour, and so is a useful tool for many organizational processes, for example: recruitment, interviewing and selection, team-building, counselling, and career-planning.
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A person's handwriting - the script - and its placing on the page express the unique impulses of the individual: logically, the brain sends signals along the muscles to the writing implement they control. By examining a handwriting sample, an expert graphologist is able to identify relevant features of the handwritten script, and the way the features interact. The features, and interaction between them, provide the information for the analysis. (No single handwriting sample will exhibit all 300 different features of course - a typical analysis will involve far less).
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Handwriting analysis, or graphology, is the science involved in producing a personality profile of the writer by examining the characteristics, traits and strokes of an individual's handwriting. I know it seems impossible, but a trained graphologist can gather an astonishing amount of information about the writer just from analyzing their handwriting. Besides creating a complete personality profile, many other things are revealed in your handwriting, such as health issues, morality, past experiences, hidden talents, mental problems-- to name just a few.
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The history of handwriting analysis to assess personality, today called graphology, could be said to extend back to Confucius, who wrote: "Beware of the man whose writing sways like a reed in the wind." The first extensive work on handwriting analysis dates to 1622, when an Italian physician named Camillo Baldi published A Method to Recognize the Nature and Quality of a Writer from His Letters. In this book, Baldi stated the fundamental premise that continues to guide handwriting analysis today: "It is obvious that all persons write in their own peculiar way . . . Characteristic forms . . . cannot be truly imitated by anybody else." In other words, like snowflakes, every person's writing is unique.
Over the following three centuries, Italian, French, and German investigators attempted to place the fledgling science of graphology on a firmer scientific footing. In particular, they linked graphology with Gestalt psychology, maintaining that handwriting originates in the brain and therefore betrays characteristics of the writer's mental makeup, even when done with a writing implement held in the other hand, the mouth, or the toes. They believed that the components of writing, such as pressure, speed, interruptions, variations in emphasis, the length and angle of upstrokes and downstrokes, and the upward or downward slope of writing on the paper, can be quantitatively measured and used to form a psychological profile of the writer. |
Handwriting by Mail
