Handwriting Speaks

by Emily Olson

Maybe the economy has had its way with you. Maybe you’re about to send a kid to college. Or maybe you’re just looking for a thrill. Whatever your reason, your action will be the same: you’re planning to rob a bank. You’ll need a note to pass to the teller that can’t be connected to you, so here’s what you should do: First, and you won’t read this in Stylus often, put down your fountain pen—its unique nib will give you away. And while you’re at it, drop your rollerball, too. Don’t write the note too slowly or deliberately, and try using your non-dominant hand. And the next step? “I won’t reveal all my secrets,” said Richard Picciochi. “We shouldn’t turn your readers into criminals.”  
Richard Picciochi is a forensic document examiner, which means that he resolves disputes related to document authenticity. He chose his career path at the age of seven when his Cub Scout troop went on a tour of a crime lab. He watched a detective test fire a gun and put the spent bullet under a microscope. Picciochi took a single look into the microscope to see the striations on the bullet, and he was hooked on forensics for good.
There is no particular degree that will make someone a questioned document examiner. Like most forensic fields, all training is done through on-the-job apprenticeships. Picciochi is a member of an exclusive club, since there are only 127 document examiners who have achieved the same level of certification that he has. Part of the reason that there are so few is that there are not many apprenticeships available. But Picciochi hopes that the current proliferation of crime dramas on television will increase awareness of the field and create more apprenticeship opportunities.  
To understand what Picciochi does requires an understanding of the way people learn to write. Handwriting is the unconscious end result of a long process that starts with imitation. A child’s writing is crude and requires a great amount of effort as he tries to imitate the forms of letters. But as time goes on, his handwriting will begin to deviate from the standard and attain individuality. A fully mature writer is no longer aware of how he writes, and instead, focuses on what he writes. It is this habitual, unconscious characteristic of handwriting that allows forensic document examiners to identify an author.      
To verify a document’s authenticity, Picciochi first needs to know what’s being called into question while avoiding context that could make him biased. He doesn’t necessarily want to know what the case is about; he simply wants to know whether he should focus on a signature, a watermark, the ink or on any one of a range of other document characteristics. To perform his investigation, he thoroughly examines two types of documents: the document in question and at least two known writing samples from each potential author. These samples may either be previously written samples or requested, dictated samples and are used to gain an understanding of the writer’s writing skill or range of writing variation.
People who try to disguise their handwriting often focus on the wrong thing. They may try to exaggerate a slant or change the appearance of a letter, but a document examiner’s cues are much more subtle than that. He looks at a writer’s overall skill because it’s an easy elimination technique, and then tries to discover whether an author writes from the wrist or with a forearm flourish. He looks at individual letters under a stereomicroscope to find out whether they’re formed in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction. He looks at the amount of pressure an author applies to paper. And finally, he looks at the letters’ relationships to each other—for example, the space between letters or their relative height. Many of these characteristics can be changed in one note, if the author knows to do so, which is why dictated writing samples are taken from a repeated series. For example, in your note to the bank teller you might write “give me all your money” and mask your handwriting characteristics perfectly. But if you’re asked by the police to repeatedly write “give me all your money” as part of a sample, your habitual characteristics will eventually creep in. Keep this in mind.