Swirling letters and a Roman numeral I, the tendency not to bring the bottom of the cursive Y back up, even the pressure of the pen as someone writes are just a few things drawn into an analysis by graphologists.
“It’s brain writing, not handwriting,” says Jan Henderson, a certified graphologist and handwriting analyst who started The Write Way LLC in 1994. “There are certain traits that can be seen – formations that are done in your writing that are from your subconscious.”
There only are four things she can’t tell from a person’s handwriting: age, education, gender and the dominant hand. Henderson says she can even see when someone has a headache through their handwriting.
It’s a skill Henderson has developed for the past 26 years, after meeting Drury University professor and graphologist Martha Brown. What developed was a fascination and dogged devotion to the science: four years of study at 40 hours per week to gain her certification.
She now specializes in personal, vocational placement, personnel, profiling and comparison analyses.
“I would have to say 95 percent of my business is comparison analysis and about 5 percent profiling,” she says. “It’s just a combination of the rest.”
Fraud has been the main area of interest, but she says the work has led down some interesting paths – from personnel profiles to reviewing threatening letters sent to judges.
“It always opens up new doors and new avenues because it is a tool to use in gaining insight,” Henderson says, noting a motivating aspect of her work is to guide individuals, attorneys and companies to correct decisions.
Bob Hammerschmidt, regional president for Commerce Bank, says he hasn’t used The Write Way for the “dark side” of the science, although there was discussion. He solicited Henderson’s services for two demonstrations: one with the Rotary Club and the other with Commerce Bank.
“In both cases, we had several people submit handwriting for analysis. She talked about the attributes of each and we tried to guess who it was,” Hammerschmidt says, noting the exercises allowed participants to guess at how well they knew their co-workers and friends.
He found the conclusions to be accurate.
“It was very enlightening because the attributes fit the people who did the handwriting,” he says, eliminating the theory of coincidence.
Henderson says she keeps her clients in confidence, and she declined to disclose revenue.
She says there are hard days, considering she’s worked for a state prosecuting attorney and state public defender. Henderson’s been involved in court cases spanning three years and has been subpoenaed more than a few times by opposing counsel.
“They’re looking at that as an out, because if I didn’t show, they would have won by default. It’s a tactic, a strategy they can use or they want you there to put you up against their expert witness,” says Henderson, who is certified by The Academy of Handwriting Sciences. “If you don’t show up, you’re in contempt of court and there goes your reputation.”
She also handles criminal evaluations, forgery, IQ, dishonesty and suicidal tendency analyses, according to her LinkedIn profile. When analyzing the letters, questionable character can be spotted in a dominant trait.
“There is a trait called felon’s claw, which is a trait that is not normal in most people’s handwriting. The name speaks for itself,” she says, before clarifying evidence of a felon’s claw in writing is just a caution.
Also, the frequency comes into play.
“People cross their Ts in five or six or seven different ways in one page of handwriting. That’s why you have to analyze it all,” she says. “You have to synergistically combine all these things. It can’t just be one thing out of nowhere. It can’t be one stroke, one time on a lowercase letter, it has to be over and over again to be a trait.”
A person’s signature, which has been repeated over the course of a lifetime, is not easily forged. The speed with which a forger writes and the bleed of the pen onto the page from the slowed motion are things she notices that are not easily masked.
In profiling, she says, a signature shows how people choose to project themselves. When compared with regular writing, the difference between the two shows whether someone is prone to privacy or the mentality of what you see is what you get.
“A graphologist is trained to look for the differences, but it doesn’t mean it’s good, bad or indifferent,” she says.
Henderson has company in the field. There are a host of societies, associations and nonprofits for handwriting analysts across the globe.
According to the British Institute of Graphologists, Italians founded modern graphology in the early 17th century, but Sumerian merchants were the first to codify their transactions in a recognizable script in 3000 B.C. The institute claims the earliest understanding of an individual’s character from their handwriting goes back to 500 B.C., when Confucius warned, “Beware of a man whose writing sways like a reed in the wind.”
