Analysis Of Myth Busters: Your Handwriting

Myth Busters: Your Handwriting is a Strong Indicator of Your Personality Graphoanalysis, a pseudoscience that claims personality and characteristics can be determined through studying a person’s handwriting, has recently become a popular way to determine personality traits. Though the curiosity of what handwriting can say about a person has been around for centuries, the Internet has made this inquiry much easier to access and toy with. A simple search in any search engine will pull up dozens of online quizzes, discussions, and articles about what a person’s handwriting says about them. This practice, however, is not realistic or reliable. This paper will discuss the origins of graphoanalysis and its key influences, how handwriting is analyzed
and the problems with this process, and whether or not graphoanalysis is “busted,” “plausible,” or “confirmed.” To begin, graphoanalysis began with European graphologers, beginning with Jean-Hippolyte Michon. Michon was the founder of graphology in the 1871 publication, Le Journal de l’Autographe, which was the first to use the term graphology to describe handwriting analysis. In later years, he made several other publications detailing graphological analysis and systems of handwriting. The British Institute of Graphologists (BIG) details on their “History of Graphology” page that modern graphology has roots reaching as far back as the early 17th century. Later graphologers followed Jules Crépieux-Jamin’s categories as listed in his 1929 book ABC de la graphologie. These categories include dimension, speed, pressure, form, direction, continuity, and layout. These seven categories consist of about 170 different signs. These signs include aspects such as the roundness of letters, how rushed they are, how close together each letter is spaced, and so on. According to BIG, graphology is used to determine a person’s “true nature and not their image,” meaning that graphology is believed to eliminate outside influence of what people believe themselves to be. This is fallacious in itself, as a person can change their handwriting both intentionally and unintentionally. One’s handwriting at age twenty is not what it was at age five, and at age thirty it will likely change again, though more subtly. Additionally, a person can change their handwriting at will. For example, there are people who are very skilled at copying the handwriting of others. Their graphological analysis would be different for every set of writing they switched to; cursive would generate a different analysis than writing in capital letters, capital letters would be different than writing with their non-dominant hand, and so on. Because of this easy change in handwriting, graphology can be proven inaccurate. The process of graphoanalysis takes time.
Because graphoanalysts need a large selection of a person’s writing to determine their traits, coming to a conclusion is no quick task. The saying “crossing t’s and dotting i’s” is quite literal in this process, considering the placement of dots over i’s and the bars through t’s are studied. But no matter how long the process, and no matter what breakthroughs are said to have been discovered, graphology remains what it has always been: a form of entertainment akin to Zodiac horoscopes or fortunetelling brought about by sympathetic magic. Sympathetic magic, simply put, is a type of magic based on either imitation or correspondence. In the case of graphology, this magic is based on correspondence. This type of magic takes two things that are similar either in appearance or in effect, and links them together. This means that graphology is closely related in belief to certain myths and folklore, such as the Ugandan idea that a woman who cannot have children will have a garden that cannot produce food. (Bartleby, 1922) Another example is astrology. Horoscopes are a way to describe people based on when they were born with no additional information. Astrology says that because a person was born under a certain constellation, they have the traits attributed to that constellation. For example, a person born in early April is an Aries. The Aries constellation is a ram, and therefore people born under the Aries constellation are impulsive,
strong-willed, and aggressive. Graphology uses a similarly vague and general process to describe an individual. But unlike astrology, graphology is not considered false by many people due to popular culture and the rapid spread of misinformation. The consequences of this can be severe: graphoanalysts offer services commercially, such as the British Institute of Graphologists. BIG lists one of the uses of graphology as a way to determine potential employees. This can be extremely detrimental to both the person being analyzed and the company or firm they are seeking employment from. Because graphoanalysts do not meet with their subject personally, they cannot actually determine their characteristics. By judging a person’s ability to work and their personality based solely on their handwriting, graphoanalysis can lead to drastic mischaracterization of an individual by claiming traits that the individual does not have, or vice versa. (The Commercial Usages of Graphology, British Institute of Graphologists) It is safe to say that graphology and the idea that a person’s characteristics can be determined by their handwriting is “busted.” One could argue that it is plausible, but only in the way that horoscopes and superstitions are plausible.
Because of its perpetual methods of analysis and its fallacious association with handwriting and personality, graphology ultimately falls under the category of pseudoscience, along with ideas like voodoo and
astrology.