We all learn how to write very early on, but with many people now making keystrokes rather than pen strokes, handwriting is nothing like as commonplace as it was. In a work environment these days, a large amount of work is done using a keyboard; the e-mail is stealthily replacing the letter sent by post; and electronic noticeboards, whether at stations or in restaurants, are increasingly in evidence. The language you choose to express yourself with is one thing, but the method you use to convey this is quite another . . . yet how often do we get to see each other's handwriting these days?
Diane Simpson is one of Britain's best-known graphologists. Her job is interpreting and analysing handwriting, and she manages to get through an entire morning's workshop without once mentioning computers. Which is both admirable and a bit surreal . . . like listening to a discussion in an Irish bar during the summer that never once touches on the weather.
"Writing is body language frozen on the page," declares Simpson, who has worked with the British police, analysing the writing of notes sent out by hostage-takers, as well as those of suspected killers. She has worked with employers on applicants from potential employees, and entertained well-heeled passengers on cruise liners by analysing their own writing.
At a Dublin workshop organised by pen makers, A.T.Cross, Simpson produces copies of handwriting samples from various famous and infamous people. Three samples of writing are displayed on an overhead projector. "Your mind has to try and follow in the brainwave of the writer," she tells us. We know, because, she tells us, that the handwriting on the screen is all male. Apparently it is not possible to distinguish gender by handwriting.
She tells us to ignore the content and focus on the way it is written. Then she asks us to choose which looks most interesting and least interesting and to say which writer we'd like to meet.
The handwriting that several of us at the workshop select as the most interesting looks confident, assured, and well, sussed. The one I am least keen on looks lazy and messy. The third one, which doesn't interest me either way, looks dull and inoffensive.
The confident, assured, and sussed writing is the work of Harold Shipman, the GP who murdered many of his patients. The lazy, messy writing is that of the vastly wealthy Duke of Westminster. The dull one is the hand of Ken Livingstone, the Lord Mayor of London.
All of this may cast some light on the mystery of why some women write to men on Death Row whom they have never seen, deluding themselves that they are in love because they are seduced by their handwriting. While Shipman isn't on death row, perhaps he gets romantic letters too?) And clearly, if you're a millionaire, you can afford to seem as lazy as you like, it simply doesn't matter, because you've already made it. As for dull Ken - well, other countries' politics are never as interesting as those in your own country.
It is, frankly, an unsettling thought that in this Blind-Date-By-Handwriting test, I chose the multiple killer.
"Women's intuition counts for nothing when it comes to handwriting," Simpsom says. However, none of us chose Rosemary West as someone we think we'd get on with in the next test, where three women's handwriting is displayed. Her handwriting looks worryingly childish for an adult woman. "Perhaps female intuition is less charitable to women than men," Simpson suggests.
She defines graphology as an area of behavioural psychology: something that can assess possible traits within a personality and future likely behaviour which is why employers are anxious for her services.
"Unlike the US, Ireland and Britain have been reluctant to take it on board, but there is a lot more interest these days," she says. Earlier, Simpson had asked us to write down a simple sentence she has dictated: the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. (You could try this quickly yourself at home before reading the next paragraph).
Now look at what you've done to the letters t and i. All those times you've heard people droning on about crossing your `t's and dotting your `i's - it's true, it does say something about you. "When you are taught to write, you're taught how to make letters. But people will find their own style; they won't continue writing the way they were taught, "Simon says.
Not crossing `t's and dotting `i's is bad news. It means you're lazy; that you don't care about making your writing legible to others (dots on `i's help decipher an otherwise untidy word); and that you're bloody-minded, in a word. After all, writing is meant to be read.'
If you have done the crossing and dotting, look at where you have placed the strokes and dots. Do they belong to the letter, or are they placed at random? Does a dot float like a bird over some other letter, where no dot should rightly be? If that's the case, it means you are pretty careless. More importantly, it shows that your mind wasn't really on what you were writing.
To remind us how hard it is to write, she asks us to make a simple movement with one of our feet while we write our signature. None of us can do the two things together. No bank would have accepted the signature I wrote. Filling in the dot, so that it resembles a full stop, shows that the writer has taken time to do so, and is thinking about what they will write next, since the brain works a lot faster than the hand can write. "Always look at what comes after a filled-in dot like that. If it precedes figures, for instance, in some financial statement I would always check out those figures. If you have to think about them that long, chances are, they're not right."
And if your strokes and dots are in the right place, then you're disciplined and organised. "Writing is transparent thinking," Simpson says. "Speed doesn't mask your writing. It may be more untidy, but it still says the same things about you."
At the end of the session, she does a swift analysis of my handwriting. A full analysis, or measurement, would take hours, and involves hundreds of points. It is very complex and thorough.
The analysis Simpson does on mine takes about five minutes, and her quick character assessment was uncannily accurate. And while Simpson stresses graphology is nothing to do with fortune telling or hocus-pocus, I'm hanging on to that analysis, which revealed a couple of things in my character I wasn't aware were there.
Diane Simpson is at www.mind- explorer.com