The writing in this illustration has a great many heavy strokes, and heavy strokes have their own value in addition to what they reveal about emotional expression or lack of it. Take for example the illustration, plate 7, which is uniformly heavy all the way through. It is not smudged, but heavy. J. Jefferson wrote with pressure on the pen, and left a strong black line from start to finish. This illustration is to particularly emphasize clearly a new rule which you must make your own in order to understand not only how a writer may express his emotional nature, but how strongly he is affected by emotional circumstances. First, however, examine plate 8, where most of the lines are relatively light. Give these two specimens some thought, for one is light, and the other is heavy, although not exceedingly so. Now here are your two new rules to add to the ones you have already had on emotional expression :

1. Heavy writing reveals a writer who soaks up emotional experiences like a blotter.   He is greatly hurt or pleased today, and in six months may have forgotten the incident, but the result of his emotional experience today has become a part of his permanent nature. He has absorbed that feeling and will be prejudiced
by it long after it has been forgotten as an incident.

2. On the other hand, when the lines of the writing are relatively light the writer may storm, and cry, or bluster around in an emotional tantrum, but when the storm is over, the effect will be gone.

These are important rules. Compare these two Forensic Science Handwriting Analysis, and the preceding plates and you will find that Ella Wheeler Wilcox in particular was not only expressive of how she felt at the time, but that she carried her feelings over, creating a great reserve of feeling that added to her im­mediate reaction to an emotional situation. When you have extremely ex­pressive writing, and great depth of feeling the expression becomes intense. It is like a hurricane in its effect on the writer as well as those around him or her.

Joseph Jefferson was one of the great stage performers of fifty years ago. He put feeling into his acting, the same expressive feeling that made Gary Cooper famous and that made little boys sit on hard plank seats and applaud their hero, William S. Hart. Both Cooper and Hart won their spurs as actors by their ability to portray emotions on the screen, while Jefferson was confined to the legitimate theatre.

You have undoubtedly gathered by this time that all highly expressive emotional people are fundamentally actors. They feel, and they want to stir feelings in others. They appeal to the emotions of others. They love it, even though they do not recognize this fact about themselves. This creates a problem in thousands of family arguments when one member of the family slants the writing far forward, and the other is a vertical or backhand writer. They look at things differently, and neither understands how the other faces life.