8. The legibility of your signature
Handwriting analysis aside, our signatures are inextricably linked to our identity. For example, if you have a legible signature, it’s important to you to be clear, communicative and easily read. “This is the conscientious person who perceives the importance of being a member of the collective, with all the norms and expectations involved, so that we all can get along harmoniously,” Poizner explains. “They respect convention.”
If you have an indecipherable signature, you’re harder to read—not only in terms of legibility but also when it comes to insights into your personality. According to Poizner, this may be due, at least in part, to your profession, like if you have a job that requires you to use your signature over and over again, and for the sake of productivity, as well as your own ease and comfort, you adapt your signature to make it simple and quick. “That becomes a variable that influences the handwriting, and it’s not defiance but merely a form of efficiency,” Poizner explains. “In this case, we don’t apply graphology interpretive rules rigidly.”
Perhaps the best-known example of this is doctors’ notoriously terrible handwriting, which, she says, may instead be the product of being unable to keep up with their thoughts as they write. In other cases, however, unreadable autographs are a form of defiance: a demonstration of a person’s attitude toward social norms and conventions. “There are occasions when you are seeing sheer rebelliousness in the illegibility of someone’s signature,” Poizner notes.