My handwriting is criminal
How’s your handwriting been looking lately? If you’re finding that your penmanship has declined some since the grade school lessons of “round, round, ready write” then you and I are in the same sloppy, sloppy boat.
While sorting through some boxes of old stuff, I came across a card I wrote as a child, probably when I was 8 or 9. Although the grammar isn’t exactly pristine, the handwriting was a solid B plus. My capital M had a nice loopy wing, and my lower-case g hung below the line just far enough. I’d written it back when schools cared what our handwriting looked like; I approached that class with the same seriousness as I did reading and math.
Fast forward to yesterday, when I was trying to write a thank-you card. Twice I got as far as Dear John and couldn’t decide if that was a J or a T, and ripped up the card and started a new one. I buy thank-you cards in bulk for this reason. When I finally completed the three sentences of the note, I read back over it and decided that if John were to hand this over to a criminal forensics investigator, I would be on a list of likely suspects.
Handwriting analysts claim to be able to discern important things about a person from her handwriting. An apparent sign of deceptiveness (not to mention poor character) is inconsistency among letters. All your o’s are supposed to be identical, for example.
When I looked at that card, I noticed that in the word “little” the two t’s were not identical. They did not even appear to be fraternal twins or from the same family or, most psychopathically of all, written by the same person.
This is not my fault. Like the rest of us, I do all my writing on a keyboard. Except for signing my name on those electronic pads at the store checkout, I don’t write by hand very often. Even my grocery lists are done by texts, to myself.
Until the last 10 years or so, I had a permanent, visible callus on the side of my right middle finger. That was where I held a pen or pencil most tightly as I wrote and wrote and wrote. I was always writing, and my body changed to adapt to it. Now the callus is gone; that adaptation is being replaced by poor posture from facing a keyboard so many hours of the day.
The technology is putting the end to all kinds of handwritten notes. I like to get them, so I still write them. But dear lord, the scribble. When I want to write more than a few lines, I type it out and then print it because, what fun is a note from a friend when you don’t know what it says.
In one of my first TV jobs, I had a boss whose wife was a self-proclaimed handwriting analyst, a fact I learned when sitting with her at a company party. I left there vowing never to let the boss see my handwriting, for fear it could fall into the wrong hands. What hidden things might she tell him about me?
Based on my research – and if you believe such things – forward-slanting writing suggests optimism. Wide loops indicate a gregarious nature. Both are pretty much true of me. As for my t’s not matching? You don’t want to know.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.