What Your Handwriting Says About You, According To A Graphologist

Have you ever wondered what your handwriting says about you? No, we're not talking about "good" versus "bad" handwriting—we're talking about graphology, or the analysis of handwriting as it relates to psychology.

Beyond providing yet another way to categorize your personality, handwriting has even been shown to provide clues about mental health and predict one's likelihood of professional success1 in some cases.

According to graphologist John Beck, former chair of the British Institute of Graphologists, graphology is all about interpreting the symbols that appear in handwriting, in order to understand the psychological makeup of that person.

The concept was invented by the French, he notes, and to become a graphologist, you typically have to study for around five to seven years.

Beck has over 40 years of experience in graphology himself and says the ways in which someone deviates from the "standard" way to write (whether that be size, spacing, etc.) is what graphologists look for.

"It is the differences between what you were taught on the one hand and what you now produce, which are of vital interest to graphologists, as it is in these differences the pattern of a person's psychology is revealed," he explains.

According to Beck, the size of your letters "has everything to do with the claim a person makes to the status they desire in life," aka, how much space you want to take up in life.

The spacing of handwriting is all about "the writer's perception of the world" and how their intelligence or "thinking power" presents itself, Beck says. "It denotes how a person is likely to behave within the world they inhabit."

You can think of your signature as your persona, outward personality, or the "image you want to give of the world of what you are," Beck says. Note that it isn't necessarily what you actually are—but what you want others to think you are.

"That is why signatures are usually different from [someone's normal handwriting]," he adds, "especially in men's writing." If someone's normal handwriting is small, for example, but their signature is huge, "this means the person puts on a big front or shop window of a larger-than-life personality yet inside is quiet, modest, and analytical," Beck says.

According to Beck, the way your letters slant can reveal a propensity toward introversion or extroversion. "A left slant in writing denotes someone of an introvert disposition—also someone who was strongly influenced by their mother," he says. And right-slanted writing, on the other hand, "denotes the extrovert, or someone who needs relationships and social life. Also, someone greatly influenced by their father," he says.