Does Your Handwriting Reveal Who You Are?

By Akande Aanuoluwapo

If you believe that handwriting can be used to understand a human character, you’re not far from being logical. Graphologists ‒ people who study handwriting to understand people’s personalities ‒ believe that handwriting can reveal a lot about people. This is because they believe that “handwriting is brainwriting.” Our handwriting reflects whatever thoughts are going through our brains. This belief is based on the fact that 80-85% of our brain cells are active while writing. Therefore, this makes graphologists believe handwriting efficiently reveals your thoughts and personality.

According to graphologists, you should be happy if you have messy or ugly handwriting. It’s believed that your brain is faster than your mind. Hence, you care more about putting down your thoughts than what your handwriting looks like. And, if your handwriting slants to the left, then you might want to consider seeing a psychologist because there’s a possibility that your parents denied you from expressing your feelings. Therefore, you have difficulty expressing yourself and your emotions, making you easily misunderstood. If your handwriting is straight, you should consider yourself a reasonable and logical thinker. If it tilts to the right, you’re likely open-minded. Funny right?

There’s so much more about handwriting that graphologists explore. They look at spacing, margins, how specific words are written, the amount of pressure applied when writing and other factors related to handwriting. Although the explanations of graphologists seem logical and easy to believe, we still need to ask ourselves; is graphology science? Is it even psychological, or is it just a random concept brought up by some people who believe that handwriting can reveal something about a person’s personality?

It would surprise you (and it might not) that the British psychological society, in a 1993 report, concluded that graphology is not a viable means of assessing a person’s character. Also, in a 1987 and a 1988 study, graphologists were unable to respectively predict people’s scores on both the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and the Myers test using writing samples from the same people who took the test.

Although handwriting might correlate with personality, as some psychologists use graphology with other tests, however, graphology is still a growing field and has a lot to prove.