If someone hadn't learned cursive writing, could they figure out some of it?

[raccoon]

Maybe a very simple sentence, such as "See Dick run."


There's bound to be somebody out there who's had experience with this...

[quinnox]

1. yes, its not that hard to read

[MineralMan]

2. Probably, sure.

But, it would depend on the handwriting, really. If it were my handwriting, it would be more difficult than with some others. English cursive is pretty easy to decipher. Most characters resemble the most common printed versions. Poor penmanship, though, could make it very difficult.

[shraby]

3. You got that right, some people can't even read their

own handwriting sometimes..Mr. Shraby is one..ergo, he prints a lot as do many many men.

[MineralMan]

4. I began printing English after a full-immersion 9-month course

in Russian. Part of our education was learning to write very quickly in the Cyrillic alphabet while listening to the spoken language. At the end of that time, I found that I was substituting Cyrillic characters in my cursive English. So, I switched to printing English, using architect's drafting characters, which are fairly fast to write. I added a few stroke shortening steps to that, and can now print almost as fast as I used to be able to write in cursive.

I no longer have a need to write in the Cyrillic alphabet, so I'm thinking about starting all over in English cursive and learning a decent-looking hand. My old handwriting is pretty awful.

[kiva]

5. There used to be two catagories of readers,

those who could read printed (printing press) material and those who could read printed and hand-written text. Similarly a divide between those who could only read and those who could read AND write.

[jtuck004]

6. Are you talking about someone's expectation that another

can "pick some of it up", or what the designee actually understands? Do they do well at pattern recognition - many don't.

In a real setting you could see a nurse that never learned it and a doctor that uses this exclusively. That's certainly possible, with all sorts of outcomes.

[raccoon]

8. IME, doctors' handwriting is impossible to read, except for maybe the first letter of the word. nt

[TheMadMonk]

7. Cursive or copperplate? Cursive is easy. Basically the standard...

...letters with "hooks" fore and aft.

Copperplate letters are significantly distorted from the very "round" letters we learned in our first years of school.

[HereSince1628]

9. I grew up thinking cursive was secret writing between teachers and parents

:rofl:

In 3rd grade I figured out that it was really pretty much printing without lifting the pen or pencil.