Signatures: Why Are they Personal?

I think the idea of the signature is strange. In the book Baron talks about how the signature becomes less and less authentic the more you duplicate it. He showed how Thomas Jefferson decided to use a signature copier called a polygraph to make signatures faster. The idea of this machine was to make the signature process faster. Now a days we have signatures we can print and so on. He then speaks about the reason for signatures. How they are to show that the person giving the signature either approved, made, or read a document entitling them to money, rights, loss of rights, owner and etc. He also stated that the secondary use of the signature was to make it more personable. To show that this letter, this document, it came from a person and they put heart, or something resembling a heart, into it.

            This is where I stop the presses and would like to think about this. Why should a signature be a personal note to anyone? It is designed to authenticate something, make it official. Any kind of personal touch that is added because of a signature is something being interpreted by the reader.

            I will say that this changes a little bit if it is a personal letter. My problem with this is that it is already a personal Letter. The personal is already implied by the format of the document. When talking about something that copies signatures from a single signature to documents, as long as they have approval from the signer the use of the signature is not needed to be a personal, singular gesture to a person. It’s just not needed to make this personal gesture when signing something like legal documents.