WHAT YOUR HANDWRITING REVEALS ABOUT YOU By David Nimmons Your handwriting is as unique as your fingerprints. It can reveal your deepest feelings, your secret desires. It is perhaps the most accurate instant indicator of your character. Today, more and more large companies are using handwriting analysis to screen job applicants and promote middle and upper management in order to exploit to the fullest their best attributes. We asked graphologist Carlos Pedregal to explain the subtle links between penmanship and personality. ======== You'd best mind your p's and q's when you sit down with Carlos Pedregal. The first clue comes as he looks up from the handwritten page he has been studying intently, on which I have jotted several lines. Those lines, and my first name, are the sum total of what I have given him to go on. Then he smiles, his eyes shining with the confidence of a sleuth who has just solved a particularly fascinating case. "How nice to know you," he says. "Shall we begin?" For the next ten minutes, I sit, at first smirking, then unbelieving, then astounded, as this man whom I have never met explains me to myself-in intimate and perceptive detail. With an occasional glance at the page before him, Pedregal sketches an in-depth, concise, unsparing portrait of the person I have spent thirty-two years trying to fathom and whom he has known for all of five minutes. With an unsettled feeling, I realize I have given this man a paragraph, and he has read me like a book. The Spanish-born psychologist dismisses my astonishment. "Writing is simply gesture frozen on paper. We all analyze gestures every day. When you meet a person, you notice how they walk, stand, carry themselves. Are they fluid and calm or jumpy and anxious? Are they aloof, assertive? Do they cringe and draw into themselves? Writing simply freezes gesture on paper, then I systematically analyze the results." Pedregal has performed such feats every day for thirty- five years. A man of letters in every sense, he was trained in Spain as a social psychologist and continued his studies in Argentina, Brazil, and France, tracing the subtle links between penmanship and personality. Today he enjoys a reputation that spans three continents. He has been consulted by corporate and private clients in a dozen countries and has analyzed "oh, several hundred thousand" samples of handwriting. Not surprisingly, the man has a sixth sense for script. Where the rest of us might see a lowly grocery list, Pedregal's trained eye sees a written Rorschach, rich in nuance and psychological portent. "The movement of writing is dictated by the brain-the organ that controls how you think, feel, react, and respond to your environment," he explains. We are all given much the same starting point: the rules we learn in school about how each letter should be formed. As we mature, we distort and revise, overlaying our own distinctive neurological patterns, personality, and temperament. "The surprise is not that our writing reflects the emotional and cognitive patterns of our brain," says Pedregal. "The surprise would be if it did not." Clearly, Pedregal is a scientist of script. Yet not long ago, few Americans would ever have put the words science and handwriting analysis in the same sentence. Had we bothered to ponder it at all, we would have ranked handwriting analysis somewhere between alchemy and divining with chicken entrails. Our friends in Europe know better. There, graphology has been an accepted discipline at least since the Renaissance. A century and a half ago, the great German philosopher Goethe wrote, "In every man's writings, the character of the writer lies recorded." Since then, European experts have lost no time in elevating handwriting analysis to a social science. In Germany, where the German-American Chamber of Commerce reports that more than half the major companies require handwriting samples of their top executives. In France, some 85 percent of the companies are reported to use handwriting analysis, and a recent survey in Paris showed that eighty out of the top one hundred companies require writing samples in their hiring process. In Israel, 60 percent of the businesses, and a majority of the collective farms, or kibbutzim, use writing samples for employment or membership. Do they know something we don't? Probably, says a well-known New York management consultant. "This is clearly a practical science. I use it if I'm hiring. It tells me if these people are deceitful or open communicators, how they make decisions, if they are detail-oriented or intuitive problem-solvers. Let people kid all they want, but it works." For more and more American companies, this is no kidding matter. A 1989 Business Horizons article reports that as many as three thousand American companies employ graphology to screen job applicants, determine job suitability or even decide upon promotions. These aren't just innovative, entrepreneurial outfits, mind you. Among the companies that have been reported to use graphological testing are Firestone, U.S. Steel, Royal Tire, Bell Atlantic, Honeywell, Renault, H & R Block, General Electric, and Thrifty Rent-a-Car. Even staid Lloyd's of London routinely analyzes the handwriting of its bonded employees who handle large sums of money. Pedregal has been a consultant to more than two hundred corporations in France, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, and the United States on matters ranging from executive hiring to employee theft. Nowadays, it isn't just business that wants to read between the lines. Handwriting experts have long been used in courtrooms and banks to authenticate signatures, and today, graphological testimony is admissible in court in nine states. Recently, the American Association of Trial Lawyers even started to sponsor seminars showing lawyers how to use graphology to help select sympathetic jury members. Marriage counselors are using it with couples, and psychiatrists have used graphological "second opinions" to help them manage troubled teens. Even Uncle Sam has gotten into the act: the Marines and the C.I.A. have both been reported to use writing samples. In 1988, in a testament to the growing respect for graphology, the Library of Congress quietly reclassified it from the "occult" section into "psychology". Unique among graphologists, Pedregal has developed his own method of coding and classifying the myriad elements in each writing sample. "Your writing, like your personality, is composed of thousands of individual elements, and every person has a bit of everything." A person may be both passive and aggressive, emotional and cerebral, he explains. The graphologist's task is to filter the graphological noise in order to focus on the dominant core characteristics that shape and drive one's personality. What fascinates Pedregal most are not the techniques but the human stories he can see between the lines. Four years ago, he received a letter from a mother in the South who had adopted an abandoned five-month-old girl. Pinned to the baby's blanket had been a note scrawled on a brown supermarket bag, bearing her birth date and name and asking someone to take care of her. From this scant trace, the woman hoped Pedregal might learn something about the child's biological mother, so that one day she could share the information with her daughter. He went to work, knowing his effort would be a little girl's only link to her lost mother. "Reading it brought tears to my eyes," recalls Pedregal. "The writing showed a girl obviously young and withdrawn, terrified young woman whose inability to relate to society made her feel isolated and lonely. No trace of confidence, no meaningful emotional connection in her life. I hope knowing this will help her daughter to understand some of what her mother was going through." Listening to his words, I finally understood what it is that inspires Pedregal and the other high priests of penmanship. Perhaps they understand that theirs is the most precious science of all: a way to help us better understand ourselves and each other. Now there would be a brave new science, indeed. ========= HANDWRITING ANALYSIS OFFER Are you tempted to find out what your handwriting reveals about you? To order your analysis, simply follow the instructions in the file TO_ORDER.TXT Your handwriting sample will be analyzed by Carlos Pedregal and his staff and you will receive a detailed, printed explanation of the characteristics it reveals.