By Anne Lo
The study of handwriting has been around for a long time. According to Aristotle, “Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience, and written words the symbol of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same speech sounds, so all men have not the same writing.” Our handwriting can tell surprisingly much about us, because a person’s handwriting is said to be totally original and deeply connected to the mind and the subconscious. It is for this reason that we can come to understand a person more by studying the graphic structures of his or her handwriting. The practice of analyzing handwriting is called graphology. Even though we cannot find out the reason for our mental states by studying our handwriting, we are able to see some of our characteristic traits (e.g. aggressiveness, open-mindedness, forgetfulness), our physical state (e.g. health, the influence of drugs), our mental state (e.g. traumatic experiences), and our emotional state at the time of the analysis. To find out all of these things, a graphologist looks at handwriting very carefully, often with a magnifying glass. Every little detail, such as the loops and strokes you make, the spaces and sizes, how you dot your i’s and cross your t’s, and how hard you press on the paper when writing are clues the graphologist uses to put together your profile. It is not easy to do. It not only requires a lot of knowledge, but also a lot of patience and carefulness. Being a graphologist is a proper job, and you can make up to US$100 an hour! While graphology has helped a lot in fields such as psychiatry and forensics, it has to be understood that graphologists are not fortune tellers or psychics, and that graphology has its limits. It cannot tell how or why (let alone the future), nor can it give information regarding physical appearance, gender, or race. Also, oriental writing such as Chinese characters cannot be analyzed by means of graphology because it is considered drawing, not writing. When you draw, your mind is consciously controlling your hand, making it impossible to find out anything beneath the conscious mind. There is another field of handwriting analysis called paleography. While graphology concentrates more on the person’s writing than the writing itself, paleography is more about the form of writing, and what it tells about the background of the manuscript. No one in Taiwan has ever studied it. No one, that is, except DFLL’s very own Professor Chou Shu-hua (周樹華), who studied it for a year while she was working on her Ph.D. in Manchester. Now here’s her story: “I’ve always been fascinated by Chinese calligraphy. All forms of writing, I find them amazing. With paleography, that’s what we do. We pay attention to form. We look at all sorts of manuscripts of old texts very carefully with a magnifying glass. We study the fonts, the format, the material on which the text was written (in many cases it’s sheep skin, and we also have to look at whether it’s the furry side of the skin or the other side since it makes a difference), even the binding. These things tell us about the scribes who were responsible for writing the things down, and also much about the social and cultural background of the time. I concentrated mainly on old Anglo-Saxon texts. The kind many DFLL sophomores are familiar with in English Literature I.” Studying paleography means having to look at many, many, many manuscripts. Having seen so many forms of handwriting, Professor Chou claims that she can read anyone’s handwriting. “My instructor at the time had the most unintelligible handwriting I have ever seen in my life. But I made an effort to read it. I read it with a magnifying glass, like I do when I read old manuscripts. After that, no handwriting is unintelligible to me. If I have a hard time making out the words, I just get out my magnifying glass.” Whether in graphology or paleography, handwriting is considered to be a key for unlocking secrets. Now that you know just how much handwriting can tell, do you want to have the power to unlock its secrets, too? If so, get a sample of someone’s handwriting (make sure the person doesn’t know he or she’s being tested), get out a magnifying glass, and start studying. * To find out more about graphology, visit www.handwritingpro.com. * To find out how you can become a graphologist, visit www.myhandwriting.com. * To find out more about paleography or what your instructor has written on your paper, visit Professor Chou Shu-hua. a
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May 2024
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