Week 5: Forging the hand — text, signatures and the tell in language

From the Hitler diaries to a forged signature on a cheque — what makes handwriting and prose fakeable, and what in them almost always gives it away.

24 August 2027

A signature is the smallest forgery most people ever attempt, and the easiest to get caught at, because a genuine signature is fast and under-thought while a forged one is slow and over-controlled — the very care that makes it convincing to the eye is what makes it wrong under a stroke analysis. Literary and documentary forgery scales the same problem up: the Hitler diaries fooled a magazine and several historians before a single material test (that pigment problem again — a brightener not manufactured until after the war) ended it in an afternoon. This lecture is about the layer above materials: the stylistic and linguistic fingerprints a writer leaves that are much harder to imitate deliberately than to produce by accident.

Outline#

• stroke dynamics: why a forged signature is written slower than a genuine one
• the Hitler diaries and the Hughes autobiography: two forgeries that survived human readers and died to instruments
• stylometry, in brief: what a writer does unconsciously that a forger can’t suppress
• studio: this week’s copy is of a hand, not a picture