For the purposes of this thread I’m talking about “recreational” handwriting analysis - I don’t know anything about the forensic kind or the kind I hear people use sometimes in hiring. Last night at our weekly wine tasting, the wine store guy had a handwriting analyst come in and analyze our handwriting for a lark. (Dad says next week we’ll have a fortune teller; our friend Tom says it’s going to be an organ grinder with a monkey instead.)
So, I was prepared for the classic “cold reading” tricks. In some ways, it did seem to match up - he told us a lot of stuff pretty fast, and I can’t remember half of it except that it kind of “seemed on target”, you know. There was one miss that I recall, “You’re pretty anal - I’m surprised you didn’t straighten this stack of paper”, which, well, he hasn’t seen my house obviously. But that’s the only “miss” I think he had. Of course, a lot of the statements were pretty vague, and some of them were repeated between the four of us who went. I mean, I think everybody probably has “something that’s bothering you that you haven’t done anything about.” Of course, my mind went immediately to my problems with D I’ve chronicled in a thread here, but that seemed like a statement that could apply to most people.
Some of it was pretty specific, though, or you could see it either way - “You love to read but you don’t get to read nearly as much as you’d like.” Well, not everybody’s a reader, but people who are readers never get to read as much as they’d like. I was the only one who got “You’re a good cook”, which in that crowd is pretty true. He also told me that I’m a take-charge kind of person, but that I’m very passive, which is unusual, so I probably do my best work when there’s somebody there to push me, which was so true I actually found it kind of enlightening.
He said I’m “very close to my parents”, and I told him, yeah, duh, you just did my mom before you did me, and he explained to me what in my signature indicated that - I connect my first name to my last name and do them the same size. I thought most people kind of did that?
So, my question is - cold reading? Legit science? Combination of both?