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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

Impressive but honestly I am more impressed by the quality of handwriting at that time. The penmanship appears flawless and beautiful. I'm not seeing any typos or corrections. The authors must have had incredible focus and a crystal clear vision about what exactly they were going to communicate (certainly from many previous drafts). It makes me think that we lost something valuable when our published words became so "cheap" by comparison.

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If interested, there was a post on Timothy Matlack’s great penmanship with writing the Declaration of Independence: https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2021/07/01/the-power-of-...

> The formality and skill of the engrossed copy strengthened the persuasiveness of the Declaration by distancing its arguments from any individual. The document [also] helped protect the identities of the signers — the names were kept secret until 1777

This is a fascinating aside that I'd never considered before (and I did not know that the signatories were kept secret for some time). Thanks for the link.

I wonder if keeping the signatories secret was done to temporarily give the appearance of unanimity, since some congressmen refused to sign.

If it helps, these documents were not written down by the authors but by a professional scribe whose job it was to write a beautiful page, or to keep trying until it was just so.

The handwriting in historical letters, while still often beautiful, was not perfect and had errors.

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