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Comment by musicale | Hacker News Reader

It might be nice for people to be able to actually read the documents in the National Archives rather than relying on a transcription or a mobile app.

I wonder if they've considered making a simple tutorial on how to read cursive? It's not that hard if you can already read printed English. And of course you can practice on documents in the National Archives.

It's exciting and fun to learn to read an unfamiliar script, like the runes on the cover of The Hobbit ... or the engraving-style cursive of the US Constitution.

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I think it likely that reading the great variety of cursive styles makes simple teaching rather complicated. Folks who spent years in school reading and writing in cursive can quickly adapt to the various styles, in a way that I'm not sure it could be done in a simple tutorial.

> I wonder if they've considered making a simple tutorial on how to read cursive?

In generations past, this was called "elementary school."

i dont think the problem is the lack of resources to learn how to read and write cursive

Except that it does say that in the article, that’s it's a lack of education in reading cursive.

no, it says the opposite, that there is growing interest in bringing it back into curriculums in various states. but that's aside from the point that the smithsonian making a tutorial on reading cursive would just represent an additional resource, of which we are not lacking, to learn. whether or not we teach it is different, but finding a resource to learn is not hard.

Maybe linking to the resource. "Learn how to read this document."

Those two statements aren't at odds with each other.

For example, there's a great abundance of resources to learn about music theory and such too, the average person doesn't know such things because they aren't interested.

I find the article's conflation of two topics involving cursive writing ignorant or disingenuous to the point that I almost wanted to respond with my own comment on that itself. If you study cursive writing in class, you are likely to learn simple and standard letterforms like Palmer script.

But the task requested by the National Archives is more akin to paleography where you can expect each author or work to have their own (region-based/family-based) handwriting that requires decipherment, even for experts. You may have encountered a coworker or schoolmate's indecipherable chicken scratch print writing; that is what you should expect, only cursive.

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