What is a Signature?

Perhaps as long as there has been the written word, there was a way for individuals to write their name, or at least a representation of one.

You have all seen the uneducated man—in movies and on TV—usually poor, from American colonial times, and back even further, when a mere “X” was written, and it meant his bond.  Usually witnesses were present who could actually write their names, verifying who had placed the X on the parchment.  It wasn’t very definitive, but it was certainly legal.  Yet if a person wrote his X large, or even very tiny, did that mean something?  It is likely that these fine points went unnoticed, back in the day, but there was something there to “read,” even if only with an X written by the person’s hand.

Then we come to perhaps the most famous signature of all, at least in terms of references to it, and that from nearly 250 years ago.  How many times have you heard someone say, “Put your John Hancock there!”  And, of course, it comes from the very assertive, if not flagrant and in-your-face statement, to King George III of England, by Mr. Hancock, essentially saying, “We, as colonists, and I, in particular, declare my independence from your tyranny!”

And so it was for the man who signed first and biggest on the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and it was history made, by more than the stroke of his hand.  It was how he did what he did.  And if you haven’t seen that particular signature, especially in comparison to the wording of the original Declaration of Independence, as well as all of the other signatures, then you have missed the first lesson in reading signatures.  That is, almost everything and anything in a signature can matter.

Unlike any other words you might ever write, your signature is very personal.  It is writing, not just your name, but think of it as writing yourself, right there on the page.

At the moment of its writing, it is not just you, but it is how you see yourself, and right down to the tiniest features of however you articulate so neatly, or make your scrawl across the page.  That signature is you, plain and simple—and often, not so plain and simple.

A signature changes over time, which is very important.  Your signature when you were a teenager, versus at age 40, and then again at 60, will not look the same.  Of course, there will be certain characteristics that will always be present for the same individual, but slow and glacial changes will be there.

Then there are the catastrophes in your life that will cause it to change faster.  The death of a parent, the birth of a child, losing your job, winning the lottery, financial ruin, breaking your arm, marriage, and divorce, are all examples that may be reflected in your signature.  That is because your signature, more than the thin little lines on the page, is not just your name, but it is the actual portrayal of yourself, and how you see yourself, here and now, at this very moment in time.  And if you think about it, it absolutely must be so. 

You may never have won the lottery, but if the day before you win it, you signed something, and then, again, the moment after the winner is announced, in signing the form to get your money, can you honestly believe there would not be some level of joy reflected, simply bursting at your seams?  Well, there would be, but not everyone would notice.  (Although as a reader of signatures—you would!)

One graphologist, Fiona MacKay Young, actually wrote a pamphlet-size book called “Handwriting Signature.”  It was the only one I could find that was dedicated to signatures, even if from a reader of handwriting.  In it she made this statement:

Your signature is the face you show the world.  It’s who you want everyone

to think you are.  It’s how you want them to see you.

Well, through everything I have seen and done in this field, what Ms. Young wrote is the exact opposite of what is true. 

When you write your signature, there is not a nanosecond of thought that takes place before you start writing, or at any time during the few short moments when you are actually penning your name, that you are thinking about what someone else might think of what you are writing.  In fact, that may be the farthest thought from your mind.

Instead, you will be thinking of what the document, letter, message, note, application, etc., that you are signing means to you.  Most people would be hard put to think of a time when they signed their name and thought to make it appear somehow different than their “normal” signature, because they were thinking of how another person might think about them when reading it.  Until this book is published, and enough people have consumed it, I would say almost no one ever thought about that.  Rather, they just write their name as the person they are.

And if you did want to write your signature thinking that someone in particular might be looking at it, and you wanted to make a certain impression, what exactly would that look like, and how would you go about figuring it out?  Would you write larger, smaller, more dramatic, more or less of a slant, and where, relative to the even-keel, right on line?  And what exactly would the planned reader be able to understand in all of that, and the difference it would be from your normal signature?  It turns out, you are who you are and what you are.  If you want to write like someone else, it would be better to try to be like that person who you want to write like, and in your everyday life, instead of trying to write your signature like that person.  Honesty and integrity are hard to beat, so just being yourself is not a bad way to write your signature.

[A point of clarification is needed here with slant versus slope.  To a certain extent they are interchangeable in describing aspects of the directions of letters relative to the line where a name begins.  But slant is also used to describe the angle of the letters relative to the horizontal line, the greater the slant, the more acute the angle letters are to the horizontal.  What used to be called “backhand” writing, sometimes, but not always attributed to left-handed writers, may have a slant that goes to the left of vertical.  Slope, on the other hand refers to the direction of the entire word, sloping up or down, away from the line, or not at all.  With no slope, it could be on, above, or below the line, but parallel to it.]

There are times when conducting an interview with anyone—an applicant, any person on the street, or a criminal—in one’s response, it is not just what a person says, but how he says it.  And it is also what the individual does not say, which can be revealing. 

There are ways of conveying information, of which the speaker is not cognizant, and the same is so with signatures.  But here, certain aspects which are not contained in the body of the signature, can be just as revealing as the words spoken—or not spoken—during an interview.  So, besides the two or three short words in each signature, it will also convey a great deal of information that is not written.

When you do write your name, as your signature, I mention that it is very personal, but it is more than that.  You are writing things about yourself that you don’t even know you are writing and portraying.  The skill in reading a signature so that information is revealed is not a parlor trick.  But learning it comes from consistently looking at a multitude of signatures over decades to grasp what they mean.

To make this point, let me set out two examples of signature reading.

My daughter, Natalia, has a good grasp on reading signatures.  During her teenage years she would find the signature of someone she considered dating, but he would not know that his signature was being read.  It gave her a head start on the relationship, and sometimes, it would end one before it began.  But before she got good at this, she would call me, at almost any hour of the day or night, describe a boy’s signature, and then ask me to tell her about him.

In the second case, there was a person I knew well, but I had never seen her signature.  The challenge was for me to write out what I thought her signature would look like, and then compare it with her actual one.

If I had not known her so well, and that she had certain quirks or characteristics in her life, this might not have worked.  But there were enough touch-points that I felt almost had to be in her signature, that I was able to do it.  When she wrote out her name—and honesty in writing her normal signature was important—and we compared them, hers was close enough to what I had written that a bank teller would have let it pass muster for cashing a check.

These examples might seem audacious, but they are real.  Now, if this concept of reading signatures really catches on, so people will mentally be looking over their shoulders every time they write their signatures, then the whole thing might fall apart due to a massive loss of integrity in signature signing.  But that is unlikely.  Rather, the greatest threat to reading signatures is that there will come a time, with the advent of computers and affirmations that you are the person who had made an order online or electronically signed this document, that the whole concept of having signatures at all might go completely by the wayside. 

So, let’s get busy so you can read signatures—while they last!

Above all, and to be comprehensive, a signature analysis is only one part of what should be a much larger investigation.  It is a key piece of the puzzle but should almost always reinforce what you have already learned about the subject of the investigation.  However, it is not the be all and end all, and the complete bottom line for who and what a person is.  Further investigation would have to take place, both to better understand the subject, and so you will see how the facets of the subject’s life are reflected in their signature.