Activity Feed › Discussion Forums › Education & Training › Cursive writing & Land Surveyors
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Eliminating cursive from our knowledge base cuts off access to hundreds of years of data. Thinking less of those who learned and used it with almost no educational infrastructure doesn’t make sense either.
Perhaps it is my age, but I see this disdain for all things less than modern as a really bad thing. Embrace the new but for the love of all things holy don’t discard tools and techniques simply because they are old. Learn the history first. See the usefulness first. Respect those who broke that ground, because we all ride the coattails of their work… -
Knowing how to read cursive is considerably more important than how to write with it. For a land surveyor, it is as essential a skill as knowing Hawaiian to understanding old Hawaiian property records. In Texas, of course, there are other skills required to read some old instruments:
But thank heavens for the Xerox Corporation and FAX MACHINES:
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BTW, for the folks who will be taking the next Texas exam, that would be (without the diacritical marks):
“varas hasta una estaca donde se formo mojonera
con un Pino de Seis pulgadas de grueso rumbo al
Oriente de la estaca 50 eslabones con otro Pino de
24 Pulgadas rumbo al Norte 100 eslabones y continuan-
do con tierra de Garcon para el Sur tomando la se-
gunda medida para el Norte cruzando el Camino Prin-
cipal y el Arroyo de Nacosote diez mil varas hasta
una estaca se hizo mojonera con un Nogal de 24
pulgadas rumbo al Oriente 50 eslabones con un En-
cino Colorado de 20 pulgadas rumbo al Norte
60 eslabones colindando con tierra baldia para el Po-
niente Y tomande la tercera medida rumbo al Ori[ente]” -
My parochial school Palmer Method penmanship was never all that good. Maybe it was the ultra-discipline of the nuns threatening and enacting corporal punishment and other verbal denigration. I am embarrassed to this day about my writing.
Our son about 6 years ago or so in 2nd grade asked about cursive. They had stopped teaching it at the public elementary. We showed him cursive and he was interested in it. He thought it was cool like a secret code writing. We briefly home schooled him in cursive. He would read some and write some. We left him notes in cursive and birthday and other cards. We let him do exercises on his own and then he found another interest for home study. I asked at school why did they stop teaching cursive and the reply was the time was better relegated to math or science. I guess topics that show on standardized testing scores.
Truth be told now, he has excellent printing kills. I saw his Jr HS science notes recently and they were neat, organized and extremely legible. I was impressed.I know the politician who introduced this bill and from association, I have a good hunch of the surveyor mentioned in the news item.
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I was missing a field note description for a survey adjoining my subject tract so I called the repository to have it read to me. The young lady who answered the phone struggled for several minutes to get through the description which was printed in what I though was fairly legible script dating to 1888. I had the adjoining field notes, so I was able to help her with some of the harder monument references like, “hill” and “El Capitan”. I couldn’t help but wonder how old she is and whether she has previously had much exposure to cursive.
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When I was a little kid first learning to write like a big person, I misheard and thought it was called the curse of writing.
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Unfortunately cursive is no longer taught in New York public schools, so if either of my boys want to follow in my foot steps, my wife and I will have to teach them cursive. In rural areas, I only have to go back a few deeds to find a hand written description.
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… In rural areas, I only have to go back a few deeds to find a hand written description.
There is the type where the entire document was transcribed into the deed book by the county clerk, then there is the type where the standard printed form is filled in handwritten, typically in cursive. The latter type can be found today everywhere.
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Tip: for those documents written in cursive. A lot of times I will type them out as I read them and just leave underscores for words/numbers I cannot yet determine. Then staple a print of that to the back or add it as a second page on the PDF file. That way next time I need to read it, I can MUCH faster.
Never thought of it this way, but it could be a service I provide to younger surveyors that can’t read cursive.
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Posted by: ppm
Tip: for those documents written in cursive. A lot of times I will type them out as I read them and just leave underscores for words/numbers I cannot yet determine. Then staple a print of that to the back or add it as a second page on the PDF file. That way next time I need to read it, I can MUCH faster.
Never thought of it this way, but it could be a service I provide to younger surveyors that can’t read cursive.
My phone, like everybodies, has a speech to text feature as an aid to composing emails and texts. Read the text of your cursive deed into an email and send it to yourself.
I do this with a lot of descriptions, especially those that are long and contain several clauses. If its a good clean copy I use OCR to get it into Word where I format it so that each “thence” begins a new line. If it’s cursive or just a bad copy I do the cell phone trick.
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My dad, a retired PLS, and my sister, a current elementary school teacher, have this debate all the time:
Dad: “How are any future surveyors going to read old GLO notes if you don’t teach them cursive? “
Sis: “How are there going to be any surveyors if I don’t have time to teach them math, science, or English?”
Me: “I bet they had this debate in ancient Egypt when hyroglyphics were going out of style.”
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K-12 schools should not waste kids time teaching them cursive.
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Eventually someone will write a program that reads cursive and converts it to text. To a degree it exists already.
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I wont say I don’t think there will never be a computer application that can decipher most cursive writing, but I do feel that there will need to be some human input to assist the computer with figuring out some of the old “s” and “f” and maybe some “q” characters. Maybe they will use word recognition to try to fill in the spaces. The trouble with that is the version of word on my computer now doesn’t like the word “Vara”, as a quick example, along with several other survey terms. It certainly does not like many of the names, lots of which have fallen from fashion in the last century, which would again need a person to decipher. The difference between the Brito family and the Brilo family is several hundreds of acres. If you do not feel that being able to read old documents is important, can I hand you a neatly lettered copy of the Declaration of Independence, which might or might not say the same as what the original says? How would someone who can’t read cursive know the difference?
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Very soon, cursive writing will be a secret code for old people.
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The best cursive writing I have seen is in Letters Patent from the Crown, circa mid 1700’s, just perfect and incredibly easy to read
the worst is some form of Gothic cursive that seems to have been a fad in the 1800s for a short period of time.
Jim
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Posted by: WA-ID Surveyor
K-12 schools should not waste kids time teaching them cursive.
Why the heck not? Too challenging?
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This issue doesn’t JUST affect “surveyors.”
What about;
Title folks, attorneys, GIS technicians, historians, genealogy researchers, the list goes on & on…
Loyal
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The ability to read in the future will not be the domain of just “old folks”. I’ve heard some say that in the future, only the highly educated upper crust will be able to read cursive. I hope so. That’s the only way I’ll ever be considered upper crust!
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Maybe teach kids to read it, not necessarily to write it.
My left hand hurts just thinking about trying to write that way
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