Why is doctors’ handwriting illegible? In fact, it’s not all doctors whose handwriting is scribblier than the norm—it’s male specialists, and they share illegibility with male executives in other professions. Why? Is it because they see themselves as important to the point of dismissing the mundane task of written notes to the proletariat? Though there’s significant debate as to whether our slants and curlicues correlate to our personalities, graphologists say they do. Here’s a small sampling of graphology basics:
Writing that slants to the right indicates an extravert, leaning forward into life. The opposite is true of a left slant, and dead vertical writing is a sign of practicality.
The larger the letters, the larger the need for attention.
The wider the space between words, the more ponderous the person.
People who write legibly want to be understood, though hyperlegibility is the mark of someone beating you over the head with their message.
Now, can you use these clues to match the following people to their handwriting samples below? (No fair reading the content for clues!)
HANDWRITING
PEOPLE
Walt Whitman, Fidel Castro, Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac killer, Mahatma Gandhi, Charles Darwin, Jane Austen, Abraham Lincoln.
While handwriting analysis can help construct psychological profiles, perhaps of more use is the more straightforward task of matching samples to suspects. Consider the case of one-month-old Peter Weinberger, who was kidnapped in 1956 from his home in Westbury, on Long Island. His kidnapper scrawled a ransom note in green ink. FBI handwriting experts noticed the kidnapper’s lowercase “m” looked like a sideways “z” and searched more than two million public documents looking for a match. A probation officer in Brooklyn found it in a document written by thirty-one-year-old auto mechanic Angelo LaMarca: his m’s looked like z’s. After questioning, LaMarca confessed and was convicted.
