Able to read cursive handwriting? The war memorial wants your help transcribing love letters
Able to read cursive handwriting? The war memorial wants your help transcribing love letters
Within the documents released are letters sharing"heartening" news and even "mundane gossip" from more than a century ago.
Okay. If i haven't already made my first 'old person' comment. This definitely is it.
Who can't read cursive?
While I can read cursive just fine, I honestly struggle with 19th century (or earlier) cursive.
Same here. I'm an old fart, and I can read things my parents wrote easily. But when you get to what my grandparents or great grandparents wrote.. the further back you go the more decorative flourishes the copperplate style seems to have and I've found it's not easy to make out every word.
A long time ago I once googled it thinking it was some obsolete skill like shorthand. Turns out it’s just the joined writing they taught you when you got your pen license, which is how I still write.
It apparently got phased out of the school curriculum at some point though. So the answer to your question is possibly Gen Z or Alpha
Edit: This isn’t my first old person comment but it’s a good un
Quite a lot of people nowadays - at least not at a fluent level. I know I've gotten worse at it over time due to rarely requiring to read much of other people's handwriting or handwrite myself, to the point where even in the reasonably clear example in the article I had to stop and consider a few words. Without experience reading cursive it's noticeably harder to comprehend compared to printed text, and we've now had a whole generation grow up in a world where pretty much everything they read was printed (and usually on a screen at that) rather than handwritten.
Me. I was never taught cursive and it takes a lot of brain power and guessing to try and figure out what thigs say
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Hahaha, yeah i've found myself in similar situations
Link to the site: https://www.awm.gov.au/get-involved/work-or-volunteer/transcription
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In 1935 Winston Churchill wrote to his wife Clementine one of the great love letters still recounted to this day.
Though text and social media messages may be commonplace today, once upon a time letter writing was the way long-distance lovers could communicate.
This Valentine's Day, a new project from the Australian War Memorial is calling on romantics for help to transcribe love letters from the past.
If you have a love of history and a thorough comprehension of cursive handwriting, the project seeks to discern the letters from Australian ex-servicemen and women.
Terri-Anne Simmonds, the head of the memorial's digital experience, is calling for anyone with a sharp eye to get involved with the project.
"That poses a challenge, so that's why we want to tap into a wide range of audiences, so those older people at home that can interpret that, we want to encourage them to help."
The original article contains 402 words, the summary contains 150 words. Saved 63%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!