I love the look of my handwriting. It’s probably the attribute I’m second-most vain about (first always and forever being: my curly hair). Luckily, I’ve been able to mask this vanity behind an ironclad belief that you learn things better when taking handwritten notes. Something about the mechanical action of having to form the letters and words with the pen in your hand makes a physical imprint that I don’t get the same way as when I’m typing. Bolstering the act of handwriting has been a hill I was willing to die on for decades, and now the National Archives is finally backing me up. Sort of. They’re not wading into anything to do with the correlation between handwriting and learning; they’re just desperate for people who can read cursive! So if you have access to a computer and internet, have the odd bit of time to spare, and can read cursive, then you can sign up to be a Citizen Archivist and help transcribe the 300+ million documents in the catalog. Color me nerd, but this sounds like so. Much. FUN!
Uncle Sam wants YOU to read cursive: More than 200 years worth of U.S. documents are in need of transcribing (or at least classifying) and the vast majority of them are handwritten in cursive — requiring people who know the flowing, looped form of penmanship. “Reading cursive is a superpower,” said Suzanne Issacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington D.C. She is part of the team that coordinates the more than 5,000 Citizen Archivists helping the Archive read and transcribe some of the more than 300 million digitized objects in its catalog. And they’re looking for volunteers with an increasingly rare skill. … “It’s not just a matter of whether you learned cursive in school, it’s how much you use cursive today,” she said.
A dying skill: School children were once taught impeccable copperplate handwriting and penmanship was something they were graded on. That began to change when typewriters first came into common use in the business world in the 1890s and was further supplanted in the 1980s by computers. Still, handwriting continued to be considered a necessary skill until the 1990s when many people shifted to e-mail and then in the 2000s to texting. By 2010, the Common Core teaching standards emphasized keyboard skills (once taught as “typewriting”) and no longer required handwriting on the presumption that most of the writing students would do would be on computers. That led to a pushback and today at least 14 states require that cursive handwriting be taught, including California in 2023.
Cursive is still taught, but barely used: In the past, most American students began learning to write in cursive in third grade, making it a rite of passage, said Jaime Cantrell, a professor of English at Texas A&M University Texarkana whose students take part in the Citizen Archivist work, putting their skills reading old documents to work. … While many of her students today learned cursive in school, they never use it and seldom read it, she said. She can tell because she writes feedback on their papers in cursive. Some of her students aren’t even typing any more. Instead, they’re just using talk-to-text technology or even AI. “I know that because there’s no punctuation, it reads like a stream of consciousness.”
Notes from the field: [Volunteer Christine Ritter, 70] says she once prided herself on her perfect penmanship but today says her handwriting is “atrocious.” Still, she can read cursive with the best of them and it’s become a wonderful hobby. “I wake up in the morning and have my breakfast with my husband, then he goes off to go fishing and I come in my work room, I have my computer and I put on my radio station with oldies and I just start transcribing,” she said. “I just love it so much.”
Citizen Kismet, reporting for duty! Yes, I have already registered (all you have to do is confirm your email, that’s the entire application process!) and started poring over Priscilla Greene’s application to get the Revolutionary War pension she was entitled to after her late husband Ebenezer served for the colony state of New York. I’ve been training for this since third grade when I got my first cursive workbook at school, just like the article says. There was a lesson for each letter, and I remember the sentence I had to write multiple times for ‘G’ was, “a gaggle of geese are giggling.” Needless to say, I get a lot of joy out of the simple act of handwriting. So to me, the professor’s description of college-level students “writing” homework using talk-to-text was… disheartening. (Similarly, I know a high school music teacher who once stopped his class to teach the kids how to read an analog clock.) But diving back into the 81-page Revolutionary War pension document is just the thing to lift my spirits!
PS — I know she’s busy, but this cursive-celebratory project, steeped in history, seems like the kind of thing expert calligrapher Duchess Meghan would be into, yes?
Header image is of Corinne Porter, a curator and exhibition developer at the National Archives, via Instagram
Yay! I love that I’m not the only handwriting nerd here. *Waves*
I rummaged around the Archives site yesterday and there is truly work for everyone, even if cursive is not the superpower you possess. One of the collections needing transcribing is a set of documents and letters detailing how the property of Japanese Americans was being sold off as they were sent to the internment centers during World War II. All typed using the old ink ribbon manual typewriters, so not easy for OCR machines to read, but easy enough for a human who knew the context. It was fascinating (and heartbreaking), and very dramatic. And a way to learn about a too-little talked about part of our history.
I used to work at a historic site connected to the American Revolution. The collection there included many documents and letters written by the Founding Fathers. Long before it was cool, Alexander Hamilton was always my favorite, because his penmanship was so damn legible!
I prefer writing notes with pen on paper too.
It always helped me back when I was preparing for exams.
Some time ago I signed up for volunteer work similar to this project: deciphering digital entries at the Arolsen Archives, an international centre for documentation and research on persecution, forced labour and the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and its occupied regions.
It’s crowdsourced, and it’s been quite the success story to help researchers with their job.
And my mom can somehow read really old stuff, despite being an MSc in chemistry. So the uni library and archives irregularly contact her when they need help with deciphering texts going back to Johannes Gutenberg and Albrecht Dürer’s time — late 15th, early 16th century, which is all Greek to me, sadly.
There has been research showing that there are many cognitive benefits when children learn cursive. I really think it’s a shame that US schools are leaving it behind. In France penmanship is still a big thing in schools and kids learn cursive almost simultaneously with regular script.
I worked on one of these in Ireland, such a buzz for a history nerd 🥰
Although I speak reasonably OK Irish Gaelic and completed a college diploma in it, I actually never learned the old Gaelic script. If I remember correctly, nearly all the English records were transcribed. Unfortunately the last time I logged in, there are still looooads of outstanding Irish records left to do, because the older script isn’t taught as standard anymore.
“Uncle Sam wants YOU to read cursive: More than 200 years worth of U.S. documents are in need of transcribing (or at least classifying) and the vast majority of them are handwritten in cursive — requiring people who know the flowing, looped form of penmanship.”
This sounds awesome!!
My own handwriting was once nicer (when I wrote more often), but I still take notes and correspond by hand.
You don’t learn cursive in primary school? Really?!?!
It’s what we teach kids in my country, really nice, rounded letters… Of course, when teenage years hit, people change their handwriting to a more similar to the computer.
That’s so strange… But ok,… Different countrie, different realities.
I knew that learning cursive in elementary schools was waning, but for some reason I didn’t equate it to not being able to read cursive…doh. I was a ’60’s elementary student, my cursive was never flowing beautiful, and bythegods has it gotten worse as I’ve aged, but it makes me sad that’s it is practically a declining art now.
Learning cursive can be particularly helpful for kids with dyslexia.
My older daughter learned it just because she had an old-school third-grade teacher (who was amazing); my younger daughter didn’t and I wish I had taught her.
My kids did 5 years of US schooling and we were surprised by the low standard of literacy taught to elementary school students. We had to do some catching up when we moved home to AU.
Our state has an official cursive that kids need to master to get their pen license in 4th grade.
The difference I think is that our final high school exams to graduate/get into uni depend on written exams that last 2-3 hours. If you can’t write cursive you’re screwed.
We use computers for our school exams to get into college in the US now. I had to handwrite but that was over thirty years ago.
My kids are 11 and 14 and both learned cursive in 3rd grade. I don’t know about all of the US, but where we live in the Northeast it’s still taught. And they write in cursive, especially my youngest.
Just signed up a couple of days ago to be a citizen archivist transcribing for the national archives. Been doing transcriptions for revolutionary war pensions (there are different categories you can choose from depending on your interests). I love history so I’m finding it fascinating – even the more mundane stuff.
I taught in a college for years and had to mark up many, many papers. It came as a shock to me when a student came to me during office hours one day to let me know he couldn’t read cursive so couldn’t understand any of my notes. I had no idea it wasn’t being taught in some schools at all. I loved mastering my handwriting.
My kids were in elementary school about 2005-2015 and I could not believe they weren’t taught penmanship! No cursive at all, and barely printing. So they can’t read any cursive and their handwriting is awful. I had them do penmanship worksheets in the summer for a few years but it didn’t help. It’s just so strange to me that they stopped teaching kids this.