Analysis Of Myth Busters: Your Handwriting

Myth Busters: Your Handwriting is a Strong Indicator of Your Personality Graphoanalysis, a pseudoscience that claims personality and characteristics can be determined through studying a person’s handwriting, has recently become a popular way to determine personality traits. Though the curiosity of what handwriting can say about a person has been around for centuries, the Internet has made this inquiry much easier to access and toy with. A simple search in any search engine will pull up dozens of online quizzes, discussions, and articles about what a person’s handwriting says about them. This practice, however, is not realistic or reliable. This paper will discuss the origins of graphoanalysis and its key influences, how handwriting is analyzed
Because graphoanalysts need a large selection of a person’s writing to determine their traits, coming to a conclusion is no quick task. The saying “crossing t’s and dotting i’s” is quite literal in this process, considering the placement of dots over i’s and the bars through t’s are studied. But no matter how long the process, and no matter what breakthroughs are said to have been discovered, graphology remains what it has always been: a form of entertainment akin to Zodiac horoscopes or fortunetelling brought about by sympathetic magic. Sympathetic magic, simply put, is a type of magic based on either imitation or correspondence. In the case of graphology, this magic is based on correspondence. This type of magic takes two things that are similar either in appearance or in effect, and links them together. This means that graphology is closely related in belief to certain myths and folklore, such as the Ugandan idea that a woman who cannot have children will have a garden that cannot produce food. (Bartleby, 1922) Another example is astrology. Horoscopes are a way to describe people based on when they were born with no additional information. Astrology says that because a person was born under a certain constellation, they have the traits attributed to that constellation. For example, a person born in early April is an Aries. The Aries constellation is a ram, and therefore people born under the Aries constellation are impulsive,
Because of its perpetual methods of analysis and its fallacious association with handwriting and personality, graphology ultimately falls under the category of pseudoscience, along with ideas like voodoo and