Meghan really wanted everyone to see the letter that she sent her father, and that must be
the reason she used THAT handwriting.
But what she did not expect is that, in doing so, she revealed quite a few... intimate details
of her personality:
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The art of longhand is a very powerful way of addressing your thoughts and emotions to
someone.
You're using your hands, so that's the first thing that makes it so personal.
The second thing is the way your handwriting conveys how important is the message, and
the person, to you.
You take a quick look at Meghan's letter opening and you instantly notice that this must not
be the handwriting she uses to write a list of groceries.
I mean, "ketchup" "bleach" and "baby wipes" must look wonderful with it, but I'm sure
she leaves this style for special occassions.
And that makes sense, because allegedly, she was crafting this letter as a very, very intimate
plea to her dad, so he would stop talking to the tabloids.
But since it was revealed that making this letter public was part of her original intention,
then we can see this longhand in a different light.
And you'll be surprised of how much information can we get just by looking at the first paragraph.
For example, the first thing I noticed were the ornaments in some letters.
The ones that look like a scythe.
Yeeah, you can't unsee that now.
But well, the ornaments at first have some rhythm to it.
She includes one in the word "Daddy", two in the first line and three in the second
line.
And then they disappear.
In the next two lines she doesn't include them anymore.
This is important because handwriting analysis shares a handful of characteristics with Body
Language analysis.
And one of them is rhythm.
For example, if someone is talking with a lot of gestures and all of a sudden they stop
moving their hands, that's a change in rhythm.
That's how you know that there was a sudden emotional reaction to a stimuli.
In the case of handwriting, changes in patterns show changes in intention of expression.
Now, we already saw that ornaments were absolutely... silenced from one line to another.
And that's odd, because if we check this letter that she sent her father back in 2015, the
ornaments are evenly distributed along all the letter.
If you count the strict ornaments per line, you see one, two, two, three, one, three,
two, one.
There's a rhythm to it, so it's not just the handwriting itself, but also making sure that
she remains in control of the whole appearance of her written expression.
To make sure the ornaments are balanced throughout the whole letter.
But let's see what happens when we check letters written to other people.
This is a thank you note to Em, in 2016.
In this case the format is no longer vertical but horizontal, so the lines are longer and
that's why there are more ornaments per line.
In the first part of the note, you see five, five, four, five, four ornaments.
You still feel that there's a rhythm to it.
But she's got this attention to detail to the point that in this case, the first line
of the second part, where she wrote Costa Rica with two capital letters, then she adds
just two ornaments to that line.
That makes like four ornaments, and it's consistent with the rhythm of the previous part.
I spot those small details and that's a signal for a perfectionist, maybe controlling personality.
It all depends of a spectrum.
Some people just have a natural attention to detail, and the other end is becoming controlling
or obsessive perfectionism.
So, if we go back to her 'private' letter to her father, now it's impossible to NOT
notice those missing ornaments in two full lines of Meghan's longhand.
But still, let's give her the benefit of the doubt and move on to another characteristic
that is word spacing.
Take a second look at this paragraph, keep in mind what I just mentioned, the space between
the words.
I'm not going to spoil it yet, just take a look at it and try to make out the pattern
of the words.
Well, the spacing between the words usually relates with the emotional state of the person.
Pretty much like when you're talking, and you feel confident, then your words have a
constant tone and rhythm.
That way you communicate better and people perceive that confidence in you.
On the other hand, you might be nervous, your brain might be racing, trying to organize
the words on the fly, while you're self aware of your body, of the faces of everyone around
you and then you either talk too fast or make blunt stops.
Basically, the more confident and in control you are, your communication will flow better.
And it's exactly the same in writing.
You can make a forensics analysis of a person's notes and with factors such as pen or pencil
pressure, word spacing, line spacing, slant angle, you can determine the flow of thought
of the person.
You can spot when the person has doubts, when the person gets emotional, when the person
has a costant thought flow, and that's useful for profiling someone just by their writing.
In this case, a letter is ideal for these kind of analysis because it has a structure
that we can follow.
And if we focus on word spacing we can see that Meghan is also very, very mindful of
this.
By the way, if you want me to analyze how Meghan's signature has evolved through the
years, don't forget to show some love by liking and sharing this episode.
Going back to Em's thank you note, the word spacing is really controlled.
The slight variations are too small to be relevant.
Notice that your perception first was tuned to spot the ornament rhythm, and now the space
between the words, and in both cases there's an almost mechanical way of doing it.
A lot of control.
Now, it's really interesting that in the Christmas letter to her dad, even if the general structure
of the letter is much more loose, for example, she doesn't start every line evenly, the word
spacing is still stable.
There are no big jumps on word spacing.
Going back to the "private" letter, now you can see it with this fresh knowledge, you
spot a totally different Meghan here.
There are more than a few broader word spacings in just this paragraph.
And what is so strange that two of those broad spaces happen right at the beginning.
That's odd, because longhand is usually more mindful and controlled at the start, and it
gets a bit looser as the person keeps on writing.
And this is much more strange because Meghan has been doing this longhand for years, like
this thank you note to Karen in 2011.
You can spot that word spacing is literally flawless and constant.
So she already has enough experience writing like this.
But then... why does she leave words floating?
The last line of this paragraph is especially interesting.
You've got words that are almost glued together, like "the pain", but right at the start, there's
a whole ocean between "eye to".
Again, this is not consistent with Meghan's longhand.
I'm NOT saying that this is NOT Meghan.
Because this is her handwriting.
It matches the other samples that we've seen so far.
But the problem is that this looks like an outlier, because with just two factors, this
doesn't look like her normal handwriting baseline.
So, we arrive at a crossroads and we have only two options.
The first option is that she was so emotionally moved by all these tabloid affairs that it
was projected in her handwriting.
But that doesn't match the fact that she emailed and texted her communications secretary Jason
Knauf to really nail the tone of the letter down to each and every word.
If you are that mindful in the content, you are not going to rush it in the execution.
So that only leaves us with the second option.
She deliberately planted those omissions.
She omitted the ornaments on purpose to absolute break their rhythm, and she played with the
word spacing, among other factors like pen pressure and slant angle.
You might be asking, why did she do that?
Well, she could have done it so the letter looked more spontaneous.
More human, and not as controlled as the other samples.
Like she was actually moved emotionally, and that's the effect of that strange ornament
distribution and the odd word spacing.
"In the case it was leaked", people will perceive, subconsciously, an emotionally charged letter.
Again, if you don't know exactly what to look for, you will still perceive it in a suBLIminal
dimenlsion.
That level of planning, control and execution tells a lot about Meghan's personality.
If you want to refine your observation and analysis skills, you just have to download
my 100+ body language tips, right in the description of this video.
My name is Jesús Enrique Rosas and I'll see you soon, my body language buddies!