HANDWRITING STUDY WITHOUT HOCUS-POCUS\Employers use Valencia analyst.

Byline: Laurence Darmiento Daily News Staff Writer

To most of us, the way people cross their t's, slant the back of their h's and connect the letters of a word are the peculiarities of a handwriting style that simply transmits the idea of a sentence.

But when Sheila Lowe looks at a person's script, she sees far more than the inconsequential dictates of an elementary school teacher. She may tell you if a person is an optimist or pessimist, a loyal follower or good leader, an organized worker or likely to have a messy desk.

Lowe is a graphologist, a member of a controversial field that treats handwriting as a decipherable reflection of the writer's mind and personality.

"No behavioral test or projection technique is going to be 100 percent accurate," says the 45-year-old Valencia resident. "But a piece of paper represents your environment. How you write on it indicates how you act in your environment."

While many liken that notion to nothing more than palm reading, not everyone agrees. Critics acknowledge that the practice has gained at least a toehold in employment screening, where companies are always looking for an edge in finding the right fit.

"A lot of what is produced is on the order of fortunetelling, but companies are out there using it," said Grattan Kerans, a former Oregon legislator who sponsored bills attempting to regulate the practice.

Working out of a small Valencia office, Lowe says she has heard it all before. When she first started her business 12 years ago, she says some people actually would ask for their fortune.

"They would stick their palm in my face and say 'Tell me my future." They also wanted free analyses. "I would say, 'Fine. Show me your signature on the bottom of a check.' "

A British native and former missionary for the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Lowe says she has seen many checks since 1984, when she opened her company, Sheila Lowe & Associates.

Charging as little as $25 for a "QuickScan" designed to indicate whether a job candidate is even worthy of an interview to as much as $250 for a comprehensive "executive report," Lowe says she completed 1,200 analyses last year.

She is also a certified handwriting expert, which is limited to forgery detection.

Her dozens of media appearances have included "Unsolved Mysteries," KABC-AM (790) talk radio and CNN.

Most of her work is performed for companies seeking evaluations for new job candidates and promotions, although she also has done profiles on prospective mates and surrogate mothers.

Subjects are asked to submit a page of handwriting on unlined paper, writing on some topic spontaneously, as if they were writing a letter.

Lowe says she uses an approach that evaluates the entire page - the width of the margins, the slant of the line and the size of the words, in addition to characteristics of the letters themselves.

"I'm looking at the whole writing on the page, not just how they dot their i's and cross their t's," she says. "It's a gestalt approach."

For example, drawing on handwriting research that started in the last century, Lowe explains that a simplified stroke is a sign of intelligence while moderately large print is a sign of sociability.

In a page-long personality profile for a company, Lowe writes that a job candidate has a "strong level of self-confidence and doesn't feel the need to make excuses." She adds, "Security is a top priority in life."

Lowe says she recommends her work be used as just one tool in evaluating a potential employee, but also claims that her analyses are 90 percent accurate, based on surveys later mailed to clients.

That is hard to verify, however. Lowe acknowledges that most companies do not like to admit they use her services, preferring them as a "secret weapon."

Indeed, one company Lowe used as a reference threatened legal action if its name were publicized. But Carl Miller, a director of Russell Stevens Inc., a Los Angeles executive search firm specializing in banking, was not shy in talking about Lowe.

"She is 95 percent correct in what she has told us about people - and you are talking to a guy who initially thought of it as witchcraft," says Miller. "We heard her at a presentation . . . and we gave her a candidate we all knew. Everyone had their mouths open, their jaws agape, from what she told us. We decided to use her.

"My favorite story is about an individual we were very interested in hiring. According to the analysis, she kept things inside and blows up at times when we might least expect it," he said.

"As I always do with candidates, I went back with her and discussed with her the analysis. I was chatting with her. What do you think she did? She got angry and blew up. The only person to do that."

Miller says he uses Lowe's analyses as one performance indicator, giving it about 30 percent of the weight. But Kerans, the former Oregon legislator, says giving that kind of credence to graphological analysis is just not fair.

"I think there is something to it. But it's not a science, it's an art, and not accurate enough to a confidence level that people should depend on it," said Kerans. "I personally did some testing by taking (my own) writing samples to different graphologists. . . . I got back all these widely differing analyses."

Kerans, now a higher education lobbyist, also says that the sensitivity companies have about employing graphology is a real problem.

During Oregon Senate hearings on his bills in 1990 and 1991, Kerans says, companies would not acknowledge using the services but worked hard behind the scenes to defeat the measures, which would have mandated disclosure of the practice.

Ed Peeples, a professor emeritus of genetics at Colorado State University at Greeley, has been performing handwriting studies on alcoholics, people with suicidal tendencies and others with physical and psychological pathologies.

Making use of computer pads that digitize writing, he has been able to measure dozens of individual handwriting elements. He acknowledges that even his work is viewed with skepticism by scientists.

"Graphology is having an uphill battle to prove what it contends," says Peeples with a chuckle. "But I look at handwriting as a thermometer or X-ray of the brain."

"I would have to substantiate that a good graphologist can give information that is pertinent to hiring or specific things the employer might be looking for," he says.

But Peeples says many problems arise out of a lack of regulation in a field without specific qualifications and training programs. He lauds the work Lowe is doing to professionalize the field.

Lowe, who studied privately and through correspondence courses, is now the editor of her own graphology newsletter, The Vanguard.

She is sponsoring a second professional conference this year in Tucson. And, out of dissatisfaction with the standards of others in the field, she plans to start a professional graphology association.

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PHOTO

Photo (1) A magnifying glass is one of Sheila Lowe's tools for analyzing handwriting samples. She acknowledges the limits of her work's accuracy. (2) Lowe uses the protractor, left, to measure the degree of handwriting slant, and the caliper rule to measure the size of characters. Terri Thuente/Daily News