The problem of handwritten character recognition is made more difficult by the fact that scanned, isolated characters are rotated or slanted in either direction and by a variable amount. This paper provides a possible solution to the problem of character rotation in the offline recognition of isolated handwritten English alphabets. The proposal involves extracting rotationally invariant global geometric properties from a character?s image to analyse its shape. The geometric properties extracted are added to the input vectors of two existing classifiers. Experimental results tested on a variety of writing styles have shown that the inclusion of global geometric property extraction can improve the recognition rate by about 40%.