I first encountered handwriting analysis at my senior prom, where someone's kind mother had hired a professional to look over our scribbles and tell us what they revealed.

It was a popular activity that night--so popular we had to wait in line to get analyzed. I happened to be standing behind a guy who, earlier in the year, had snubbed me for the Sadie Hawkins dance, and I must confess it gave me great satisfaction to hear the graphologist tell this boy his handwriting indicated irritability. Ha!

Now that many years have passed and I have a better perspective on the relative importance of high school dances in the grand scheme of life, I have shifted my focus to other things.

Such as, does handwriting really reveal our character? And if I see this guy at our 20-year reunion, will he still be irritable?

Analyzing handwriting for clues about character--a practice formally known as graphology--is surprisingly old. As far back as 1622, people were writing treatises (presumably by hand) on the subject. Early practitioners did their best to link specific signs in writing to character traits. And as the field developed, scholars of it hypothesized that handwriting said as much about a person as how he walked, gestured, and looked. In other words, a person could frown on paper as easily as she could frown with her mouth or mopingly shuffle her feet. 

The idea that you can know what people are really like by studying their handwriting is intriguing. It would be much nicer to find out someone is dangerous because of the way he writes instead of through a criminal act he commits.

For whatever reason, graphology has caught on more in Europe and Israel than it has in the United States (except in court, where handwriting experts are used to identify forgeries).

Do Europeans know something that Americans don't? Or are they relying on the equivalent of horoscopes, tea leaves, and chicken bones to glean key information about people?