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.
