This paper presents a survey of the literature on handwriting analysis and writer verification schemes and techniques up till date. The paper outlines an overview of the writer identification schemes mainly in English, Arabic, Bangla, Malayalam and Gujrati languages. Taxonomy of different features adopted for online and offline writer identification schemes is also drawn at. The feature extraction methods adopted for the schemes are discussed in length outlining the merits and demerits of the same. In automated writer verification, text independent and text dependent methods are available which is also discussed in this paper. An evaluation of writer verification schemes under multiple languages is also analyzed by comparing the recognition rate. New method proposed for identifying writer using slant, orientation, eccentricity enabling to identify writer"s mental state by features associated.