“It is hard to imagine a world in which handwriting dies out completely, let alone a time when everyone prefers to type out a love letter or dictate it to Siri. I think something will also be lost if there are no more people like graphologist Tracey Trussell.
Graphologists analyse handwriting to assess personality traits. Sceptics abound about this sort of thing, but Trussell says she is often hired by companies to assess potential employees. Curious, I asked if she would analyse a bit of my handwriting and, within a day, had received her eight-page evaluation of my scrawl.
I was told my ‘self esteem is healthy’ on account of my personal pronoun I being a good size, while my right-slanted words show a finely tuned emotional barometer, albeit with ‘the ability to be acerbic and scathing at times’.
“Spot on,” said my husband. The rest of us may take more convincing, yet life would surely be poorer without this sort of thing.
As Trussell notes in her book, Life Lines, writing by hand is one of our species’ foundational achievements. We take it for granted, but if it disappeared completely, we would miss it more than we can ever imagine.”
Words by Pilita Clark, an @FT associate editor and columnist.
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