You make a valid point about the direction of the strokes, and I’ve noticed that, while experimenting on myself with every pen I’ve picked up in the last week or so, my “scribble” isn’t without pattern or form: it begins with harsh, straight, zigzag lines (often in a bottom-left/top-right diagonal pattern which I assume is because I’m right-handed) and then devolves quickly into a more-curved and spiraling pattern which is perhaps more-representative of the art of writing. You can just about make out me doing a little bit of it in the third section of the animated GIF in the post.

(I also really appreciate the thought you’ve put into justifying your “hello”!)

Perhaps this “scribble” is an abstract representation of my internal concept of “writing”? Now I want to gather up a corpus of people ‘scribbler’-variety pen-testers and a graphologist and compare the nature of their scribbles to the type of their handwriting! Is there a correlation between my messy scribbles and my unstructured handwriting (which has always been poor, even before I used to type virtually everything!)? If so, would be expect scribblers with a more-careful cursive hand to make more-careful scribbles, or even repeat a particular doodle (while researching online, I found a handful of people who draw smiley faces as a test of a pen: I wonder what their handwriting is like?).

A while back, Matt in the Hat expressed an interest in graphology. I wonder what he thinks of all this.