What is Handwriting Analysis?

DAY ONE (LAB)

Watch this clip:  "You got all that from his handwriting?"

Handwriting analysis serves two purposes:
1- to tell if multiple documents were written by the same person, and
2- to inform the analyst of personality characteristics of the writer.

Even if two people learn to write cursive in the exact same style, their handwriting will be different.  One person may slant to the right, the other to the left.  One person may write with heavy pressure, the other light as a feather.  These variations reflect the personality of the writer.

Analysts look for four basic qualities in the writing they study:

1. Form:  the shape of the letters, proportion, slant, angles, lines, retracing, connections, and curves.
2. Line Quality:  what type of pen/pencil was used, how much pressure did they write with, and how does their writing flow?
3. Arrangement:  spacing, alignment, formatting, and distinctive punctuation.
4. Content:  spelling, phrasing, punctuation, and grammar.

It can be tricky to analyze handwriting sometimes.  A person may deliberately disguise their handwriting, which can make it complicated but not impossible to interpret.  The writer may also be influenced by drugs or alcohol, and that changes their handwriting.  Still, certain qualities in the writing will remain consistent and therefore give the writer away.

If someone is asked to give a handwriting sample, there's a specific procedure to follow:
1. The subject should not be shown the questioned document
2. The subject should not be helped with punctuation or spelling
3. The subject should use materials similar to those of the document
4. The dictated text they're assigned should match some parts of the document
5. The dictated text should be repeated at least three times
6. The subject should be asked to sign the text
7. Someone should witness the procedure to see it's done right

Instructions:  choose one of these articles to read and take careful notes on it.  Write me a paragraph in which you answer ALL of these questions:
1- What are the basic traits you were taught to recognize in your article, and what do they reveal about the writer?
2-  What surprised you as you were reading?
3-  What/who did you think about as you studied this article?
4-  What will you do with this information?

Idiot's Guide to Handwriting Analysis- Margins
Idiot's Guide to Handwriting Analysis- Line Spacing

DAY TWO (LAB)

Write these sentences three times in your typical handwriting, cursive or manuscript, using a pencil:  The little black and white train that could and did. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogs.
      
Study these links as a class, taking notes about which traits your own handwriting shows and what it means.  When you're done, you can play the handwriting analysis game.

What Does Your Handwriting Say About You? -Infographic
What Does Your Handwriting Say About You? -Short Video
Handwriting Analysis Game

Dr. Seuss Poetry

If We Didn’t Have Birthdays- Dr. Seuss

If we didn’t have birthdays, you wouldn’t be you.
If you’d never been born, well then what would you do? If you’d never been born, well then what would you be? You might be a fish! Or a toad in a tree!
You might be a doorknob! Or three baked potatoes!
You might be a bag full of hard green tomatoes.
Or worse than all that . . . Why, you might be a WASN’T! A Wasn’t has no fun at all. No, he doesn’t.
A Wasn’t just isn’t. He just isn’t present.
But you . . . You ARE YOU! And, now isn’t that pleasant!

Too Many Daves- Dr. Seuss

Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave
Had twenty-three sons and she named them all Dave? Well, she did. And that wasn’t a smart thing to do. You see, when she wants one and calls out, “Yoo-Hoo!
5 Come into the house, Dave!” she doesn’t get one. All twenty-three Daves of hers come on the run! This makes things quite difficult at the McCaves’ As you can imagine, with so many Daves.
And often she wishes that, when they were born, 10 She had named one of them Bodkin Van Horn
And one of them Hoos-Foos. And one of them Snimm. And one of them Hot-Shot. And one Sunny Jim.
And one of them Shadrack. And one of them Blinkey. And one of them Stuffy. And one of them Stinkey.
15 Another one Putt-Putt. Another one Moon Face. Another one Marvin O’Gravel Balloon Face. And one of them Ziggy. And one Soggy Muff. One Buffalo Bill. And one Biffalo Buff.
And one of them Sneepy. And one Weepy Weed. 20 And one Paris Garters. And one Harris Tweed. And one of them Sir Michael Carmichael Zutt
And one of them Oliver Boliver Butt
And one of them Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate . . . But she didn’t do it. And now it’s too late.

QUIZ

Terms to know:

Tone: attitude the speaker has toward the subject 
Rhyme: repeated sound at the ends of words
Rhythm: musiclike pattern of stressed and unstressed sounds in lines of a poem

A. Choose the correct response to each item.

1. What is unusual about the following line from “If We Didn’t Have Birthdays”?  “A Wasn’t has no fun at all.”

A It ends with a period when it should end with a question mark.
B The verb does not agree with the subject.
C The word wasn’t is used as a proper noun rather than a verb.
D It does not express a complete thought.

2. How would you describe the pattern of rhyme in “Too Many Daves”? 

F Every two lines end in a rhyme.
G Two words in every line rhyme.
H Every line ends with a word that rhymes.
J The end words in every other line rhyme.

3. How many stressed (accented) syllables are pronounced in the following line from “Too Many Daves” to create rhythm? “Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave”

A three
B four 
C five
D six


B. Choose one poem, and describe Dr. Seuss’s tone—his attitude toward his subject. 

Spring Storm

Spring Storm

by Jim Wayne Miller

He comes gusting out of the house, 

the screen door a thunderclap behind him. 

He moves like a black cloud

over the lawn and---stops.

A hand in his mind grabs

a purple crayon of anger

and messes the clean sky.

He sits on the steps, his eye drawing

a mustache on the face in the tree. 

As his weather clears, 

his rage dripping away, 

wisecracks and wonderment

spring up like dandelions. 

***************************************************************

-What do you think the theme of this piece is?

-Write About It 

What do you think happened in the home before the boy stormed out the door? Write a dialogue between him and another character or two in the house. What did they argue about? Who said what to whom leading up to his angry exit? Create the other characters as well as the things they said to one another. Your dialogue will look like a play. Don't forget to add stage directions, so your actors will know what to do in addition to what to say.

What is Figurative Language?

1. Figurative language is language that uses words or expressions with a meaning that is different from the literal interpretation. When a writer uses literal language, he or she is simply stating the facts as they are.
   Example:  "Kevin Anderson is a good PE teacher, but he smells like monkey armpits." That is a factual statement, and it is not figurative language.  
   Example:  "Mrs. Kempton is a beautiful ray of sunshine, glittering across the rippling surface of a giggling brook."  This is figurative language, because although Mrs. Kempton is clearly beautiful and her radiance could be compared to sunshine, she cannot LITERALLY be both human and a ray of sun at the same time.  Also brooks don't giggle.  But it kind of sounds like they do.  That's why people always refer to brooks as giggling, laughing, chuckling, etc.  
   *NOTE:  this is a good time to discuss the word "cliche."  A cliche is a phrase or description or idea that has been overused.  An example would be if we walked out into a heavy rainstorm and I said, "Boy, it's raining cats and dogs today!"  People always say that when it's raining a lot.  
   Activity:  let's see how many cliches we can come up with as a class. :)  
   
   Ok, that was fun.  Time to watch a video and learn more about the types of figurative language.  Figurative Language Video

Romeo and Juliet Read Aloud Scenes

First Kiss... Act 5, Scene 5

Romeo, Romeo... Scene 2

Fight Scene... Act 3, Scene 1, Page 3

Death Scene... Act 5, Scene 3

Romeo, Romeo... Scene 2

What Do You Infer?