Let the schools teach cursive, by all means. Some collections contain documents of a personal nature and some were generated from a specific business or industry. In an age when most of our handwriting is just for our own eyes, why would we insist that everyone write the same way? You may as well dictate what song we all have to sing in the shower. 1800present (bulk 18901945) The Manuscript Archives include paper items created by businesses or individuals. Tolkien to Jack Kerouac and David Foster Wallace. Watson Library actively collaborates with the Museum's Archives and curatorial departments to digitize important collections of original manuscripts owned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, including dealers' archives, artists' sketchbooks and correspondence, archaeologists' field notes, and papers of former Museum officials. And over the years, a lot of authors have chosen to use print over cursive, from Charlotte Brontë and J. But print styles go back to the Renaissance. When I was growing up, I thought of it as a childish form of writing that you abandoned when you started to learn grown-up cursive. I can understand the prejudice against print. Reuben Marmaduke Potter - Texas Manuscript. New Orleans - Merchant Samuel Wright Oakey letters. Letters (2) Mormonism (1) Music (21) Nantucket - Whaling (0) Native Americans (38). In an age when most of our handwriting is just for our own eyes, why would we insist that everyone write the same way? You may as well dictate what song we all have to sing in the shower. Manuscripts, Ledgers, Diaries (53) Maps and Cartography (40) Medicine (3) Mexican War.

But as long as their writing is legible, why should I or anybody care which style they use? One writes in all caps, another in a rather elegant modern italic. They may use it to keep a personal journal or to write the first draft of a novel, as a lot of authors still do.īut their longhand communications will be mostly limited to filling out a form at the DMV or leaving a note under someone's windshield wiper. But until recent times they were always meant to be read by others, in manuscripts, letters, ledgers, reports.īut once our graduating seniors hand in the blue books for their last final exam, they'll probably never again have to produce a piece of extended longhand to show to anybody else. The writing styles we use trace their ancestry back to ancient Rome. periodicals, letters, ledgers, manuscript journals, government papers. Yet we really have come to the end of an era, even so. Material types include manuscripts (treaties, speeches, petitions, diaries. There was never any real danger that digital technology would replace pen and paper, no more than that it would kill the printed book. You can't just switch on autopilot and take down every word - you have to actively process and summarize what you hear. Handwriting has the virtue of being slower than typing on a keyboard. That's not just because they're spared the temptation to keep checking Facebook. NPR Ed Does The Fight For A Cursive Comeback Miss The Point?

Manuscript letters ledgers