Professional handwriting and document examiner Ruth Elliott Holmes ’67 calls handwriting analysis “the sister of psychology.” Personality facets and character traits can be studied through slant, pressure, loops, spaces and the size of handwriting; patterns of thought, emotional discipline, energy and enthusiasm, imagination, hidden aptitudes and natural abilities are all expressed through handwriting, she says. Used widely in Europe where it originated, graphology only recently has been tapped as a resource by lawyers and corporations in the States.

Holmes returned to the U. S. in 1979 after living abroad for 10 years and was intrigued by the graphology books in her mother’s library. Professional analysis of her mother’s handwriting had detected writing and research abilities that led her mother to Radcliffe’s School of Zoology and a successful career. Holmes began taking every available course on the subject, including studies with Felix Klein, the father of U.S. graphology.

In 1983 Holmes founded Pentec, Inc., a forensic and personnel consulting firm in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., where she advises individual, legal and corporate clients. She has worked as a jury consultant for the defense team on the last five “right to die” trials of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, most recently this spring. Holmes told Kevorkian’s lawyer that if she could see the juror information forms she could help. In the 1996 trial, a United Methodist bishop was nearly challenged by the defense on religious grounds, but Holmes argued to leave him in the jury pool based on his handwriting. She said his writing revealed that he would look at the facts of the case to make his decision. The bishop became the jury foreman and a key figure in Kevorkian’s acquittal.

“Everyone should have some knowledge of handwriting. It gives you one more impression of the person,” said Holmes. More corporations are using handwriting analysis for team building and conflict resolution. Handwriting analysis helps people to understand different styles of thinking, making it easier for them to work with or persuade others. “You can stand what you can understand” is one of Holmes’s maxims. She also works on investigations in which handwriting in documents like bomb threats or wills is examined to detect forgeries or fraud or to determine authorship.

In today’s world of computer communications Holmes is concerned about e-mail replacing handwriting. “The child who cannot crawl will have problems overall. Handwriting is part of the development of the brain,” she said. For Holmes the analysis of handwriting, or “brainwriting” as she calls it, is a human archaeologist’s study of the landscape of the mind.

Holmes’s daughter, Sarah ’97, a third-generation graphologist, recently opened a Pentec office in Cambridge, Mass. She is pursuing her certificate as a handwriting analyst and document examiner and is consulting with her mother, whom she calls her best friend and mentor. “The more positive relationships [people have] with good graphologists,” said Sarah, “the more widely accepted it will become.”

—Alicia Nemiccolo MacLeay '97