But is doubt about the yearbook inscription warranted? To answer that question, The Post spoke with Mark Songer, a former FBI agent who now works as a forensic document examiner in the private sector in Denver.
Songer wasn’t able to offer any assessment of the validity of the inscription, which is precisely the point: There is not enough information at hand for an outside observer to make such an evaluation.
“No two writings are ever exactly alike,” Songer said. “Handwriting is a complex motor skill of sensory neurological and physiological impulses. After practice and repetition, writers interject their own individual characteristics into their writings which become a pattern of habitual formations that are repeated from one writing to the next.”
In other words, your signature is never exactly the same each time you write it — but each time you write it there are common characteristics that your signatures share.
To evaluate whether a questioned signature is your signature, a document examiner would need a lot of other examples of your signature (Songer said he would need five to 10) to have enough evidence to determine whether the questioned signature was valid. For other handwriting, like the rest of the inscription, he would need much more: other examples of your known writing (that is, things proven to have been written by you) that would allow him to evaluate individual words and sentences.
What’s more, Songer said, those known writings would need to be contemporaneous to 1977, the year that the inscription was purportedly written. “Everybody’s writing eventually changes over time,” he said, meaning that a bunch of handwriting from 2017 wouldn’t necessarily provide the necessary information to evaluate writing from 40 years earlier.
Asked whether there was evidence of multiple writers, Songer indicated that he didn’t have enough examples of Moore’s writing to say with certainty.
“Looking at the yearbook entry,” he said, “it looks pretty spontaneously prepared” — that is, it doesn’t look like the writer stopped and restarted, as though someone were tentative in writing perhaps because they were trying to imitate another writer. “It looks very fluid. I don’t see any indications of unnatural writing.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...es-writing-was-forged/?utm_term=.4e04a2ad8fce