Examination of Rarely Disguised Features of Handwriting

Abstract

Every individual’s style of writing is unique and has a personalized touch. Disguised handwriting is a wilful modification of a person’s natural writing with the aim of concealing authorship requires a lot of attention to detail. This is the method usually used by suspects when providing handwriting samples to court for forensic document examination. It is also used commonly is used in anonymous letter writing by such individuals as those involved in execution of bomb threats where individuals try to hide their identities. The purpose of this study was to examine the characteristics of handwriting and identify the features that are rarely disguised therefore allowing authorship identification. The study targeted students from different departments within Kirinyaga University and feedback obtained from 200 randomly sampled students. The students were given an exemplar paragraph containing most common word combination, punctuation, distinctive letters and numerical combination. Two handwriting samples were obtained from each respondent, natural handwriting and disguised handwriting. The natural handwriting was examined and classified into class characteristics and individual characteristics and compared against the disguised handwriting samples. The chi-square test was used to determine whether there is significance difference between expected frequencies and observed frequencies. Features that were rarely disguised included punctuation position, slant, word spacing and change of letter case. This paper presents an analysis of rarely disguised features of handwriting that are critical in assisting forensic document examiners in establishing the authorship of questioned documents.