Can You Read Cursive?

Some nights when I can’t get to sleep, I try and remember how to write lower case and upper case letters in cursive. If you remember way back in grade school — or maybe you have seen this in an old movie or photograph 1 above the blackboard or greenboard, there would be each letter of the alphabet in perfect penmanship. 

These days, cursive has been replaced by a computer keyboard or printing if we are writing a note to someone. 

If you have a little bit of time on your hands and would like to volunteer, The National Archives is looking for people to read and transcribe more than 200 years of documents ranging from Revolutionary War pension records to the field notes of Charles Mason of the Mason-Dixon Line to immigration documents from the 1890s to Japanese evacuation records to the 1950 Census. It’s all at Archives.org.

Of course, Artificial Intelligence is being used but sometimes it can’t read what someone wrote 200 years ago. 

And, for the record, my writing is a combination of printing and cursive. I will probably keep writing that way until I can no longer hold a pen or a No. 2 pencil.

As I see it, I’m Bill Dollar.