What Does Your Handwriting Say About You?

Emoticons and personalized signatures are now an integral part of our communication. Our every emotion and mood can be effectively conveyed with the use of colours, fonts and icons. All these tools are used for conscious projection of our personality.

Handwriting belongs to this same family of communication means. It displays our personality traits through various factors such as size, slant, zones, margin size, pressure and distinctive letter formations.

Have you ever noticed how you reacted to a friend’s writing on a birthday card? Was the script large, slanting rightwards, perhaps colourful? Maybe this friend also used several exclamations and doodles to make it look more interesting. Without even knowing it, you would have smiled to yourself and thought how outgoing and fun-loving this friend was.

Now let us examine another imaginary card, from a more serious-minded friend. Is the lettering smaller in size? Evenly spaced, neat and legible? Do the letters appear upright, following an imaginary, straight baseline? Here, you may have instantly recalled this friend’s intelligence, focus and independence.

You may have just realized how each of us analyzes handwriting to some extent or the other. The professional graphologist takes this intuitive response to a greater level. Extensive study, measurement and analysis of numerous factors of handwriting help in building up a comprehensive personality profile of the writer.

If you would like to get a better understanding of how this concept works, consider this: Imagine a person walking into a party. Let this person be tastefully dressed in the trendiest clothes, confident and impressive. Suppose this person smiles at everyone, but shortly joins up with her clique of close friends. She may pass witty comments and laugh engagingly at others’ jokes. What kind of writing do you think this person would have? Wouldn’t it surprise you if you were told that she has an untidy scrawl, where the words run into one another, presenting an overall picture of messy, confused smudges? It is more likely that you are picturing a neat, classy script, slanting forward moderately, with lots of “garlands” or curves joining the letters together. Correct? This is because at some subconscious level, you may have already noticed the “consistency” of a person’s personality. Leaving aside deliberate pretensions, a person tends to project the same personality through all means of communication. The way in which he approaches his spatial area (as the room in the above example) is very akin to way he approaches a blank piece of paper.