WRITE SUPREMACY

Before we get to the fine print, let’s have your John Hancock right at the top of this page. Now, have you been wondering about a raise or a promotion? Your answer may be right there in blue Bic. Loopy t’s, Mr. Veep, aren’t leadership material. An ascending signature, however, is optimistic and ambitious, white large and rounded loops with ending hooks, a right slant, and low t-bars may indicate alcoholism.

Write it and weep, The art of handwriting analysis, long made popular by grocery store pocket books, is rapidly gaining an air of respectability, according to two local businessmen who’ve read the writing on the wall for executives at Texas Instruments, Rockwell International, E-Sys-tems, and Fox & Jacobs. Those and 140 other Dallas businesses are paying as much as $285 a hand to have handwriting analyst Jay Larsen test and interpret the penmanship of employees and prospective employees.

With Art Bissonnette, a former General Electric national sales manager. Larsen runs Professional Management Consultants. The two say that from the results of the handwriting tests they administer, they can tell employers which of their people are most promotable, spot those who would be best in sales or some other function, and even identify those who might be unhappy in their current position and looking elsewhere for a job.

Answering the probing survey myself, I felt more than a little foolish to find myself admitting that if I were my animal of choice, my friends would be “hawks” and I would live in “the mountains” with “another blue bird.” I became suspicious of Larsen’s truth-in-writing theories since it seemed to me that my answers, whether typed or handwritten, might yield a personality analysis at least as reliable as the one I later received. Why not focus on lifestyle and dreams, not loops and dots? But Larsen maintains that the substance of the answers is irrelevant. The questions are intentionally of a personal nature, he tells his clients, because people worrying so much about how they answer the questions, will forget to worry about how they write, and thus give a genuine sample of their writing.

After each full test, Larsen produces a four-page “Confidential Profile” including sections on aptitudes, energy and stress, ethics, work habits, sociability, emotions, leadership, motivation, and self image.

Larsen admits and emphasizes that the tests are fallible: ’”We don”t play God.” But he also says that his analyses have been responsible for at least one canceled wedding, several promotions, and a warning given to one family of a son’s suicidal tendencies.

Larsen also works with clients on graphotherapy, helping them to change writing styles in hopes of changing certain elements of their personality. Larsen can encourage the handwriting traits that may mean a person is thrifty, honest, and accurate and discourage carelessness with details (absence of dots over i’s and crosses over t’s). Larsen can even help recognize problems at home (a woman who leaves an unusual amount of space between her first name and her married surname, for example, is trying to add distance between herself and her husband, he says).

Critics of graphoanalysis say the personality descriptions given are no more specific than a horoscope and that they have the ring of truth only because they are so general. James Hin-ton of Hinton Mortgage & Investment Company calls himself a skeptic even though he thinks the profiles are useful as “communication stimulators” and his company frequently uses them. Steve Renock, also of Hinton Mortgage, says he uses the tests to bypass the effects of head-hunters, who often coach a candidate on what to say. Another businessman, nervous about our using his name, says he uses the tests to get to the bottom of personnel problems: “The analysis is like an antenna showing what’s in a person’s heart, Booze, a nasty divorce, or other problems always show up.”