Comment by jez
15 hours ago
The handwriting in some of these snippets, while sometimes difficult to read for one reason or another, is nonetheless beautiful: did everyone who wrote have such great handwriting back then?
I'm looking at the piece in the Instagram post linked by the page, which begins, "honor of holding in their service". The lines are so straight, the letters are so uniform!
As someone with terrible handwriting but decent cursive, i think cursive provides a better structure for achieving cleaner penmanship compared to non-cursive writing. My theory is that cursive’s consistency of soft, flowing loops rather than a mix of abrupt angles and disconnected lines helps create a more uniform result.
I also remember teachers telling you when writing cursive to seldom lift your hand from the page. I think that act of keeping your pen on the page for most of the writing process encourages a smoother and more natural flow, reducing the chance of jerky, uneven strokes
Widespread literacy is an extremely recent phenomenon.
I highly doubt most people could write that well
The US is an extreme outlier with regards to a high rate of literacy compared to almost everywhere else during the 1600-1800s. Today is a different story, Massachusetts had a higher rate of literacy when education was made compulsory in the 19th century than it does currently, which is kind of astounding.
> Sheldon Richman quotes data showing that from 1650 to 1795, American male literacy climbed from 60 to 90 percent. Between 1800 and 1840 literacy in the North rose from 75 percent to between 91 and 97 percent. In the South the rate grew from about 55 percent to 81 percent. Richman also quotes evidence indicating that literacy in Massachusetts was 98 percent on the eve of legislated compulsion and is about 91 percent today.
https://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=307
Handwriting is a skill, you get better with practice!
A lot of bad handwriting stems from using it to write down things quickly (see: https://imgur.com/doctors-strike-5ANma ).
If you instead focus on doing slow calligraphy, your handwriting can improve rapidly.