Current Shareware 1994 January/SHAR194.ISO/misc/grapho11.zip/ARTICLE.TXT

Text File | 1993-10-24 | 9KB | 315 lines

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.