The document below is admittedly
a rather prosaic one drawn from the compiled service record of Theophilus
Perry, a soldier in the 28th Texas Cavalry. It is included for a
simple reason; namely, can you read it?
Some of my students this
semester have stated that they find it extremely difficult to read handwriting,
not because they have vision problems, but because they have little experience
writing in cursive or deciphering cursive handwriting. On top of this, I have
read recently that there are public schools that will no longer be teaching
cursive handwriting. Regrettably, this means that future historians will have a
difficult time if they wish to study our “early” history. Will the contents of
handwritten documents be more likely to be ignored if they can’t be easily
read? Will historians decide to concentrate on the more recent past as a
result? Will history departments add a special course someday on how to decipher
cursive handwriting? Perhaps special software will be developed to aid in the
process of decoding that handwriting?
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