Graphology analyzes the physical form of handwriting itself, the slant and pressure of the strokes, the size and spacing of letters, the shape of loops and margins, and the overall rhythm of the writing, treating these features as expressions of stable personality traits independent of what the writing actually says. A graphological assessment typically produces a detailed personality profile: firm, even pressure might be read as decisiveness, a rightward slant as sociability, wide margins as a certain generosity or extravagance, and so on through an extensive coded vocabulary built up over more than a century of practice. Graphologists have used the method for vocational guidance, compatibility assessment, and, notably in mid to late twentieth century France and Israel, employee screening for hiring decisions.
The discipline's modern form dates to Jean-Hippolyte Michon, a French priest and archaeologist who spent years collecting and cataloguing correlations between handwriting features and known character traits before coining the term graphologie and founding the Societe de Graphologie de Paris in 1871, systematizing what had previously been a looser, older tradition of reading character from handwriting that stretched back at least to Camillo Baldi's 1622 Italian treatise. Michon's student Jules Crepieux-Jamin further developed the system into a more flexible, holistic method that dominated later graphological practice. Because graphology examines only the physical form of writing, in principle it can be, and in well designed studies is, separated cleanly from the content of what was written, a distinction that turned out to matter enormously once the method was subjected to controlled testing.