Is there a relation between handwriting speed and intelligence? By Sheila Kurtz, Master Graphologist

Interestingly, yes!

People of above average mental capability often gravitate in modern society into jobs that at times require hurry and rush, like emergency room doctors, or a hospital resident with twice as many patients to see as she or he can handle.

When these “intelligent” people are under the gun of deadlines and demands, and yet they must hand write prescriptions and instructions, there is often so much information in their minds that they must produce in minutes that, like a high pressure fire hose, the force of the flowing ideas makes the stylus buck and scrawl, and the result is the infamous, and mythical, “doctors’ handwriting.”

Ergo, when intelligent people get over-rushed, they scrawl, and the tracks they leave on paper are occasionally unreadable. The jobs that demand handwriting and a lot of brainpower under pressure usually go to the smartest of the pack.

A company of which I am a director, Graphology Consulting Group, has collected the handwriting of more than 130,000 medical doctors over almost two decades, worldwide, and in fact barely 10 percent of these doctors write illegibly enough to be misunderstood, and the rest range from moderately legible to exquisite.

Speed tends to make most handwriting more crude; most intelligent people will not speed unless it’s absolutely required, and instead they take their time to make their handwriting usefully clear.

It’s also worth noting that from anecdotal experience, those doctors whose handwriting is most shallow and scrawled are often the same ones who tend to make most mistakes in entering correct information via keypad into computers.

-By Sheila Kurtz, Master Graphologist