Recall that:
When imitating handwriting that requires a high level of skill to execute, the same kind of skill isn't even drawn upon. Instead of acquiring the same set of handwriting skills that someone had through repetition, the imitator would activate a different set of skills in the attempt to produce something similar in appearance. The effort itself affects smoothness and line quality.
As Brown points out:
The conclusion drawn here is that the handwriting isn't an imitation but rather someone's own natural handwriting:
The fundamental difference between writing with one’s own handwriting and imitating someone else’s is that the former uses proprioceptive feedback (i.e. internal feedback that allows the body to keep track of the relative positions of its parts) while the latter is essentially drawing, and relies heavily on visual feedback to maintain its desired form.
When imitating handwriting that requires a high level of skill to execute, the same kind of skill isn't even drawn upon. Instead of acquiring the same set of handwriting skills that someone had through repetition, the imitator would activate a different set of skills in the attempt to produce something similar in appearance. The effort itself affects smoothness and line quality.
As Brown points out:
The features that Anastasopoulou underscores (through repetition) as characteristic of Mar Saba 65 are artful and unconscious qualities that result from quick, habituated pen movements. Through years of repetition, a person’s natural handwriting will possess those qualities, but the same person’s imitation of another’s handwriting will not. Instead, imitations of skilful handwriting lack smoothness and certainty of movement; they display a quality that document examiners refer to as tremor and bad line quality. Koppenhaver and Tom Davis offer helpful explanations:
These explanations bring together three of the qualities that Anastasopoulou identifies in Mar Saba 65—smoothness, continuousness, and confidence—under the rubric of good line quality, attributing them to skill and speed and opposing them to the overall bad line quality that characterizes freehand imitation, the shakiness and uncertainty of direction sometimes called forger’s tremor.
It is important to realize that forger’s tremor is not something that occurs sporadically within writing that generally looks normal. As Anastasopoulou stresses in her supplementary report, “tremor of fraud shows a painstaking and unnatural care at every point that indicates an effort to follow an unfamiliar copy.” Forger’s tremor is the slow, hesitating pen movement involved in simulating another person’s writing, so one cannot talk about forger’s tremor unless the writing generally exhibits poor line quality and uncertain movement.
Tremor is the most easily detected and the most frequently found sign of forgery. Tremor results from slow writing or drawing. Writing is a little like riding a bicycle. When the bike rider slows down, the wheels will wobble. If the rider leaves a path in the dirt, it will resemble a wiggly line. The same is true of the writing line. When the writer slows down to copy or trace a line, the line will waiver.
Line quality refers to the degree of smoothness of the pen line. Good line quality is smooth, confident, with regular uninterrupted curves. Bad line quality is irregular; the curves are interrupted, tending to degenerate into a series of straight lines, showing pausing, or even penlifts, where the pen is taken completely off the paper. It is a matter of degree of skill, and speed. If our expertise in writing is inhibited in some way, the pen will move slowly, and the line quality will degenerate accordingly. In the act of forgery, since we are necessarily not as expert at producing the graphic shapes of someone else’s writing as the writer will be, then the pen will move more slowly and the line quality of our imitation will be poorer than that of the original.
Line quality refers to the degree of smoothness of the pen line. Good line quality is smooth, confident, with regular uninterrupted curves. Bad line quality is irregular; the curves are interrupted, tending to degenerate into a series of straight lines, showing pausing, or even penlifts, where the pen is taken completely off the paper. It is a matter of degree of skill, and speed. If our expertise in writing is inhibited in some way, the pen will move slowly, and the line quality will degenerate accordingly. In the act of forgery, since we are necessarily not as expert at producing the graphic shapes of someone else’s writing as the writer will be, then the pen will move more slowly and the line quality of our imitation will be poorer than that of the original.
These explanations bring together three of the qualities that Anastasopoulou identifies in Mar Saba 65—smoothness, continuousness, and confidence—under the rubric of good line quality, attributing them to skill and speed and opposing them to the overall bad line quality that characterizes freehand imitation, the shakiness and uncertainty of direction sometimes called forger’s tremor.
It is important to realize that forger’s tremor is not something that occurs sporadically within writing that generally looks normal. As Anastasopoulou stresses in her supplementary report, “tremor of fraud shows a painstaking and unnatural care at every point that indicates an effort to follow an unfamiliar copy.” Forger’s tremor is the slow, hesitating pen movement involved in simulating another person’s writing, so one cannot talk about forger’s tremor unless the writing generally exhibits poor line quality and uncertain movement.
The conclusion drawn here is that the handwriting isn't an imitation but rather someone's own natural handwriting:
Anastasopoulou was clearly interested in whether the questioned document displayed the degeneration in line quality that results from imitation and concluded that it does not. Rather, based on the overall fluency of this complex hand she deduced that it was written with speed and skill by “a hand used to writing in this manner.”
Statistics: Posted by Peter Kirby — Thu Apr 18, 2024 9:07 pm