See illustrations of various kinds of handwriting at end of this book.
GUIDED HANDWRITING AND METHOD USED
Most Frequent and Dangerous Method of Forgery—How to Detect a Guided Signature—What Guided Handwriting Is and How It Is Done—Character of Such Writing—Writing by a Guided Hand—Difficulty in Writing—Force Exercised by Joint Hands—A Hand More or Less Passive—Work of the Controlling Hand—How Guided Writing Appears—Two Writers Acting in Opposition—Distorted Writing—How a Legitimate Guided Hand is Directed and Supported—Pen Motion Necessary to Produce Same—Influence in Guiding a Stronger Hand—Avoiding an Unnatural and Cramped Position—Effect of the Brain on Guided Hand—Separating Characteristics From Guided Joint Signature—Detecting Writing by a System of Measurement.
Guided handwriting is one of the most frequent means of forgery and oftentimes the most difficult to detect. It has been established that with care the elements of each handwriting can be detected and proven in a guided signature. The leading handwriting experts of the world are unanimous in declaring that it is possible for holding another's hand in making a guided signature to infuse the character of the guider's hand into the writing.
Guided handwriting is the writing produced by two hands conjointly and is usually erratic, and at first sight, hard to connect with the handwriting of any one person.
The character and quality of writing in case of a controlled or assisted hand must depend largely upon the relative force, exercised by the joint hands. The difficulty in writing arises from the antagonizing motion of one hand upon the other, which is likely to produce an unintelligible scrawl, having little or none of the habitual characteristics of either hand.
Where one hand is more or less passive, the controlling hand doing the writing, its characteristics may be more or less manifest in the writing. But obviously the controlling hand must be seriously obstructed in its motions by even a passive hand; and since the controlling hand can have no proper or customary rest, the motion must be from the shoulder and with the whole arm. The writing will therefore be upon an enlarged scale, loose, sprawling, and can have little, if any, characteristic resemblance to the natural and habitual style of the controlling writer, and of course none of the person's whose hand is passive.
In appearance it changes abruptly from very high or very wide to very low or narrow letters. This is to be explained by the non-agreement in phase of the impulses due to each of the two writers. If both are endeavoring at the same moment to write a given stroke the length of that stroke will be measured by the sum of the impulses given by the two writers. If they act in opposition to one another, one seeking to make a down stroke while the other is trying to make an up stroke, the result will be a line equal to the difference between the stronger and the weaker force.
As these coincidences and oppositions occur at irregular but not infrequent intervals, like the interference and amplification phases of light and sound waves, the result traced on the paper might be expected in advance to be—and in fact is—a distorted writing where maxima and minima of effect are connected together by longer or shorter lines of ordinary writing.