25 Years of personal experience in creating and writing text, in editing manuscripts and writings of people of various ages, in graphic editing, letter design and book making, along with 15 of those years doing it professionally and heavily networking in a community of artists with similar interests and sharp, highly competitive levels of criticism regarding anything related to it. It is essentially my life and has been since my fascination with it at age 8. If you want me to consult more people like myself, I'd be happy to ask them, but I am confident they would agree with me that it's a very suspicious document if I showed them part of this without telling them the context. And unfortunately, any confidence that this gives you (that I know what I'm talking about) is of course self-imbued.nonhocapito wrote:I don't see what you describe but that's just because I know nothing of graphology. Can I ask... where does your knowledge of graphology come from?hoi.polloi wrote:It was maybe done with some cursory understanding of graphology but it is not a skilled forgery. The major clue is the poor variance in letter style, such that the letters are individually crafted (to roughly resemble one another) rather than written holistically as a learned hand does. It is very much as though it were copied from a script letter by letter, which would include deliberately misspelled words, and they were still figuring out the artificial "character" of their own handwriting.
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Unfortunately, most people will glance at this crude graphic and think it's evidence that something on paper actually exists and it is what it's purported to be.
Graphology is kind of a joke and controversial as a term, and so perhaps I should not have used that word, but I feel people understand what I mean when I say that instead of referring to "Exemplars" (which, in this case, we don't have, though a forgery for an operation of this size could easily use the same crew to forge a number of minor documents; coming up with signatures, etc.) or anything else related to forensics, which sounds like the average person cannot access this level of analysis for themselves.
I don't have experience with art in a courtroom setting, but I have experience with graphic artistry itself, and loads of creative minds who manipulate graphics and text to form the basis for cultural works. So to sort of pitifully answer your question, knowing full well it doesn't really help you "see" what I've described (no pun intended), my experience in analyzing countless pages of hand-written text and text art comes from this personal experience in the techniques of hand-written text for both artistic and practical use. This is why people trying to compare Simon's cartooning style and my own make me laugh out loud. Of course, it's not a joke for amateurs who think our styles are similar by putting stroke against stroke. It's like those people who try to say Welsh is the same language as Mandan because there are a few "friend" words: http://www.languagegeek.com/siouan/mand ... welsh.html
My belief is this "Omar" letter is an artistically directed, creative work, and not the casual hand writing of a slightly unskilled person.
If we must believe it was done by the alleged signer, "Omar Mateen", or even a forger, they must have had an artistic fascination with integrating various writing styles into a singular purpose. That is, curbing default habits into an affected style that is incongruent with the natural habits of the hand. An affectation for the authority reading? I highly doubt it. I am with SacredCowSlayer in the sense that the premise of the existence of the document in this form is doubtful too. In that case, we may ask, why not a typed letter? Something less open to such scrutiny?
Well, why so many mistakes in the photo manipulations we've caught, too? They don't mind as long as the average person is already looking at it with fear, trepidation and consideration to take it for what we're told it is rather than wondering: hmm, how hard would this document be to fake, with present technology?
Forged letters? The oldest trick in the book next to rolling a borrowed seal. Kids do it to get out of school. But occasionally, an actual call to the parents is required to confirm the letter was written by them. In this case, I would ask you to dial up the "parents" in your head and ask if it passes for you.