However, emotional expression is. far more common than you may think. It is common not only in America, but among the Latin races. They feel and show how they feel, their emotional expression ranging from moderate to extreme. No matter how the individual reacts, however, it shows in the handwriting. Take yourself, for instance. If you write far to the right, you are impulsive, and frequently act first and think afterward. If you are calm and self-possessed, you write more nearly vertical, or even backhand.

People show how they feel in varying degrees. For example, it is not possible to say that every warm-hearted person grows hysterical in face of some situations that affect the feelings. This is not true. For this reason it is important that you become familiar with how to measure the degree or amount of emotional expression. You do this with an Emotional Expression Chart, which is reproduced here.

This chart has five lines slanted upward along with one vertical line. One of the slanted lines is made to lean backward, and it is just as im­portant that you understand the value of this slant as any of the forward slanted lines. The forward slanted lines are all used in determining the emo­tional reaction of the individual writer.   The vertical line shows the poise,

or lack of emotional expression, while the backward slanted stroke is slanted so that it is extreme, representing the extreme of the slant of backward writing. You need an actual Emotional Expression Chart for your quick handwriting analysis. You can make one, either from a small square of glass, or thick plastic. Merely place either the glass or the plastic over the chart illustration here, and trace the chart with India Ink. There is one disadvantage in using a home made chart; the ink is likely to smear, and so your chart becomes messy to use. If you prefer, you can secure the professional chart for only a few cents

Do you jump at conclusions when you hear a bit of gossip or when you catch half of a TV newscast? Do you choke up quickly when you listen to a revivalist or a political speaker when he bears down hard on your feelings ? Are there times when you come down in the morning feeling fit as a fiddle, then suddenly find that you do not care what happens, the bottom of your world seems to have dropped out. Then you feel good if someone gives you a word of approval. Your day brightens up and you feel like going ahead full steam?

If you find these questions fit your conduct, there is only one graphology and health answer. You slant your writing well forward, possibly not as far as the writing of Warner Baxter, the long time movie favorite. You are ruled by your feelings. You feel, and show how you feel. Even if you are not talkative, anyone who knows you, or even a stranger can tell how you feel by the way you move your head, or the look in your eyes.

The effect of human emotions may be likened to a strong wind. If you have ever seen a hay field or a field of small grain when swept by a high wind, you have had a wonderful example of how the strong wind of emotional force will affect an individual who is emotionally responsive. Some people, in fact a great many, are not highly expressive of their feelings. Some men and women can meet the most upsetting situations and keep calm and cool and self possessed through everything. Such writers are identified by their upright or even their backhand writing.

The case of Charlie is a striking example of how such changes can be accomplished, and the results. Charlie made a great deal more money than he ever expected to have by getting the franchise for pin-ball machines in army camps during World War II. When he settled up after the War was over he had money, a lot of money he did not know how to handle.   Quite naturally he immediately became the saucer of honey around which hovered men with doubtful ideas that they wanted to finance. Charlie invested and invested until he suddenly found himself without funds. His invest­ments were not paying off. His days of being a capitalist were over, with his bank account overdrawn. He had urged that I accompany him on a trip to the city, and we had unexpected car trouble. It was his car and he wrote a check to cover the repairs. That evening I found him in his hotel room writing a suicide note. Under rather severe cross-questioning he admitted what he considered his failure in life. He was whipped and was not only broke, but ashamed.

“I can’t go back and face Mary,” he said. “She does not know the situation, and she can of course go back to her profession and take care of the children.”

As a result of that conversation he started to learn handwriting analysis online free a very simple handwriting exercise, and only a few weeks later breezed into the office to report that he had been made branch manager of a concern where his earnings would mount. He had something he had never had before. He had self-confidence. He had made a few changes in his writing-not major changes, and he had achieved results. You will find out how he did it, before you lay this book aside. You will learn, too, what this simple exercise did for me at a time when I faced great responsibility.

Altogether you will find much in the following chapters that you can use. This is the only reason for writing this book. It is not an easy task, and as I write it there is always the need to omit the pronoun I. What graphology has done for me, and for others, is no more than it can do for you.

This, my friend, is how graphology has come to you. In the chapters that follow you are going to get a new look at yourself. When you find something you do not like in your own handwriting, face it like the fellow just mentioned. You are not perfect, and when you find things in your writing that you do not like, you can be sure they are there. And you can be equally sure that before you finally lay this book aside, you will have discovered how you can change at least some of the weaknesses, either discarding them, or overshadowing and starving them by building stronger traits that offset them. You will learn how you can change your own writing and change your character.

At this point you may feel like throwing this book down, and saying “I don’t believe it,” which after all would be foolish. A man cannot dis­believe a thing about which he knows nothing-and before you complete this book you will have learned how to strengthen your own personality by changing your writing.   I know.  I did it.

When you know how to use graphology and so understand yourself you will also have found the key to changing your own character traits. This discovery of how to change personality came about as a result of demand. Thousands of men and women through the years wrote, “You analyze our handwriting and tell us how we feel, and think, and act, but you do not tell us how to correct our weaknesses. Do this, and you will have helped us more than money or anything else can repay.”

With such a challenge a second period of testing began. It was just as tedious, just as heartbreaking as the long search to find the answer to my own question about the tails on my handwriting. However, one thought persisted. If handwriting revealed the traits of character of the individual, would it be possible to change the writing, and eventually change the indi­vidual, causing him to gain traits he wished to have, and nullify those he wanted to destroy or remove from his thinking?

That was how the tests began, and in a later chapter you will be given the key to how to make such changes. This book alone cannot teach you all there is to know on the subject. Only a handwriting analysis free online can guide you in making some of the more complicated changes, but you can change your character by changing your writing.

There is a deep debt that you and I both owe to many very earnest scholars, men and women who had achieved too much fame to want to sign cigarette and liquor advertising who permitted me to study their hand­writing, prepare analyses, and then severely criticize them. They did us both a favor. They helped me on how to be a handwriting expert and as graphology in your hand becomes a tool to make your own life brighter they helped you.

Truly big people are always ready to help. It is the stuffed shirt who does not know and is scared to death that someone will find that he does not. is the only one who scoffs. Really big minds say, “If you have some­thing let us see it. If you are working to achieve something worth while, let us help you.”

This does not mean that all of the people who helped were graduates of colleges. Some of them were and had forgotten it. Some had learned in the vast school of life how little they knew.

Even “bad” people, assured of anonymity frequently helped. I shall never forget one scoundrel who, when he learned what I was attempting to do asked me to take his handwriting, and tell him the truth. He sat thru it quietly, and then spent the rest of the night telling me what had hap­pened to him in his life, the little points I had missed, and where I was right.

As for the number of handwritings and people, there were not hun­dreds but thousands of them. My daily mail from magazine readers who were kind enough to read the stuff I wrote-and I wrote ceaselessly except when I was exploring handwriting, ran from fifty to two and three hun­dred letters a day. I read their letters, their confidences, and I studied their handwriting. Frequently our correspondence ran into a dozen or more letters. Every letter I wrote to my distant correspondent was worded to get a reaction. Aside from this the railroads and buses and cars took me over more than a hundred thousand miles, checking on individuals.

You may say, “the man did not have time to do anything else.” You are correct. Many of my pieces of fiction and other magazine copy were written on portable typewriters in the caboose of a freight train. Other writing was done late at night. During the day I followed the job that provided my traveling expenses, and gave me a chance to talk to people, get their example graphology, study them, and their surroundings.

One other point was important. My explorations in order to answer my own question about the tails of my handwriting began when I was young. As years went by I was able to follow through «on cases where I had been puzzled.

If I had been sports-minded there would have been no graphology. If the one and only girl had not married someone else, there would never have been any graphology.

It was a dreary afternoon and the Dague Business College had not folded as anticipated. I was dreaming of an editorship of a magazine in Chicago that never materialized, and suddenly back of Frank Gore’s chair his shorthand notes hit me squarely. That is, the idea hit me. Frank made his shorthand notes exactly the way he acted. Precise, careful, and almost copybook right. He acted that way. Frank was just as precise as his cousin that I dated out of school. The rest of the class was straggling their notes over the white pages until it was sometimes impossible to determine whether the left to right stroke was intended for an m or n for a curved rather than a straight stroke.

Frank Gore’s notes gave me the key to forensic handwriting analysis. It was not handwriting that would answer my questions. It was a stroke-an un­necessary stroke, that I had added to my practice pages that had earned those red marks for me. Strokes were what handwriting was made up of. not just letters. For instance, the longhand g had a down stroke, sometimes a backward stroke before the upward stroke was started. The s was made with a circle, but sometimes there was a circle inside of a circle, sometimes two circles. It was strokes, and that is what you will know more about when you complete this book.

From that afternoon the going was fairly easy. After I went into military service there were experiences that were valuable. There was plenty of opportunity to study handwriting as a reflection of people in my organization and slowly and steadily I was arriving at some basic con­clusions. There were times when some principle seemed to be verified, and then it would be knocked out entirely by something that had been over­looked.

One question has been frequently asked by people who are given to statistical thinking. It is a question that cannot be answered. There is no record of the specimens of handwriting nor the people who were studied. Certainly not hundreds or a few thousand. One man wrote me once that he had told someone four thousand odd, but I hope no one believed him. His handwriting showed he would not tell the truth, and as he was one of my test cases, long after proving the principles of graphology, he may be interested, if alive, in knowing that he too was a test. Not a test to see if a principle was correct, but rather a test to prove that a certain combination of elemental traits would produce a scoundrel.

It was more or less a matter of trial and error, disappointment, and repeated effort until something happened several years later. I had quali­fied as a shorthand teacher, not of one system but several, but the idea of learning anything about my problem from shorthand never occurred to me at that time-and then I actually stumbled onto the answer.

An employment agency had sent me to teach shorthand in a business college in Shawnee, Oklahoma. About the second day it was plain that I had made a mistake. The head of the school was drunk half the time, in­deed he was drunk the afternoon he found that the local business people were talking about running him out of town, and taking over his business school for me to manage. They did get rid of him as a menace to the morals of the town, and I started to Chicago, but stopped in Wichita be­cause I had met a business college man there who looked progressive.

Actually he was just about broke, but there was a little money in my watch pocket and we made a deal whereby I would stay and teach short­hand for at least a few weeks. Possibly he hired me expecting me to stay until he vvent broke, but that summer he began advertising me as the only shorthand teacher in captivity who could write and teach seventeen systems of shorthand. Those seventeen systems and that advertising was the answer to my question. Handwriting Analysis Samples from students who had been exposed to shorthand in high school or other business colleges, came flocking into school. There were Gregg, and Spencerian and Dougherty shorthand writers. All the shades of the Pitman systems, Benn Pitman. Issac Pitman, and a dozen variations all were enrolled in my dictation classes. All I had to do was dictate, and walk around looking over their shoulders and watch for inaccuracies. It was a scatterbrained bunch for most stenographers will agree that only a handful of people ever write shorthand as it is taught.

The why of this became a consuming thought. After all they had said, why did I seemingly obstinately continue to add those long strokes which did not belong there?, Although I was not very alert mentally, (my hand­writing  from  those  days  shows  that  I  was  mentally  about  as  nim-com-poopish as the average, maybe more so) I came up against the problem of finding why I put those pesky tag ends on there. Monkeys had long tails, but I studied myself in the mirror and did not find any more resemblance than there was between other people and the simian.

Was I putting those tag ends on there because there was something wrong with me mentally, or was it because I liked graphoanalysis instead of base­ball, and had a morbid fear of snakes? There was nothing else to do. The reason had to be found, and I set out to find it. No young fellow ever wrote more love letters and joined more correspondence clubs than I did in those days. Now and then I found a writer who put on long tails to the words, but their photographs all looked like nice girls, or fairly decent young fellows. When they did it, however, we certainly had one thing in common.  What was it?

From that time on I studied shorthand. When other young fellows were chasing baseballs I was writing shorthand outlines and loving it. One system followed another until I had managed to learn at least in a passable way almost twenty different systems, and if you are starting to grow grey, you will recall that in the early part of the twentieth century there were almost as many shorthand systems as there arc ways of getting a home permanent wave today.

One other subject was essential although I did not know it then. I analyze handwriting. Not just ovals, but Palmcrian, Zanerian, Ransom-erian, and half a dozen other muscular movement systems. One teacher after another must have added a grey hair here and there because of my papers. Only a few weeks ago I ran onto an old letter I had written back in those days, and just at first I thought it was the work of some successful penmanship teacher, until my eye caught one weakness.

I put long finals on almost every word. Very long finals, and the teachers said “No” and meant it. My papers would be all right for a day or two, and then I would slip back into my original penmanship sin, and would get the papers back with red ink strokes slashed across the tails on the words.