INTRODUCTION

Welcome to Handwriting Analyst©! With this program, you will gain deep insight into the personalities of others - whether you've met them or not. The world is filled with fascinating strangers, celebrities, historical figures, potential business associates or employees, and many others. Handwriting Analyst© gives you access to these people as well as to your family, friends and acquaintances. All you need is a person's signature, and accurate personality assessment reports can be produced. Handwriting Analyst© makes it possible for you to do the analysis yourself, without formal training in graphology!

There are other software programs which analyze personality in different ways. Some use colors or adjective checklists to produce personality assessment reports. Unfortunately, these programs either require the cooperation of the subject or careful observation of the individual, so they can only be used for assessing people who the user has met. Further, if the software user must check a list of adjectives after barely meeting an individual, it is easy to pick the wrong adjectives and generate an inaccurate report since some adjectives require in-depth knowledge of the person before they can be accurately checked.

When people have their handwriting analyzed, they receive revealing information about themselves from an analyst who may examine nothing more than their signature or a few sentences scribbled on a piece of paper. To the superstitious, it is as if Handwriting Analyst© has mysterious occultic powers. Handwriting analysis has nothing to do with the occult and does not attempt to foretell the future. It does, however, reveal an individual's personality through handwriting at a particular point in time.

Handwriting can be viewed as a social activity, as finger and hand movements which result in strokes, and as letter shape formations. Writing a letter or note to someone is a social activity involving interpersonal communication. An image in the writer's mind of the person to whom the letter is being written influences the writer's behavior in ways which vary according to the writer's personality.

Writers habitually form letter shapes in characteristic ways. The formations of different writers vary in respect to the type of the letter form as well as in respect to size, width, height and style. Specific characteristics of the handwriting indicate the presence of correspondingly distinct personality traits. The written document thereby provides a foundation for drawing psychological conclusions about the writer. Finger and hand movements involved in writing result in strokes which can be fast, slow, straight, round, long, short, heavy, powerful, lively, fiery, thin, soft, sleepy and/or clumsy. The psychological meanings of these strokes are often implied by the words used to describe them.

Writers deviate in varying degrees from the standard handwriting patterns they were taught in school. Most people develop their own handwriting style after a few years of practice and change it during their life span, as their personality changes. In Handwriting Analyst©, Copybook writing based on the Zaner-Bloser method of penmanship, which is typically taught in grammar school, is used as a standard basis for comparison.

The strokes examined in the Signature Analyst© program are notable for specific reasons and have a meaning about which most graphologists agree. There are many other ways to form letters which are not represented in this program, either because graphologists do not agree on their meaning, they are a simple variation of a type of letter formation which has already been identified, or their evaluation takes us beyond the scope of this program.

Potential sources of bias based on gender, ethnic background, religious affiliation or nationality do not affect the Handwriting Analyst© program. The sex or handedness of a writer cannot be determined by examination of the handwriting sample, so Signature Analyst© must ask for this data. Subtle script variations between people of different national origins and those educated in a foreign country also do not significantly affect handwriting analysis.

You will not need to read this manual before you get started. The reports you generate, however, will be only as accurate as the matches you make. Therefore, take the necessary time to make sure that you understand each question and select the best possible match. We recommend that you regularly check your signature samples with the graphic samples which are provided onscreen, and choose Skip on any question which is unclear. When you choose Skip, your reports may not be as long as those produced by a professional graphologist using the program, but they will be just as accurate.