Three Reasons Cursive Still Matters

• Government archives need people who can read cursive to transcribe and tag more than 200 years of handwritten records.
• More than 20 states now require schools to teach cursive, yet many teachers never learned it themselves.
• Experts say handwriting beats typing for learning and memory, but nobody has proven cursive beats print.

By Samuel López | USA Herald

Millions of people stared at a thank-you note this week and couldn't read it.

The note belongs to Angelina Jolie. She wrote it in 2023 to the staff of a luxury resort in Greece, where she reportedly stayed while filming ‘Maria,’ the 2024 Maria Callas biopic. It resurfaced online recently and became a public reading test. One viewer said her script “was hard to decipher even though I read cursive,” and someone said, “it looks Arabic.”

Others turned it into a generational dig, with one commentator saying Gen Z should learn cursive just to read her notes.

Laugh if you want. But the joke lands on a real problem, and the people who feel it most aren't scrolling social media. They work in government archives.

Those archives hold more than 200 years of records, and many of them are handwritten in cursive. That includes documents from the Revolutionary War era that historians and genealogists depend on. Someone has to read those pages to transcribe and tag them. Until that happens, the records stay out of easy reach. That's why archives need people who can read and write cursive.

The National Archives operates a Citizen Archivist program, allowing volunteers to transcribe historical documents into searchable text. The agency says many handwritten words are not reliably captured by automated systems. Even when Optical Character Recognition and artificial intelligence are available, the Archives says extracted text is often less accurate than manual transcription, particularly when records contain faded or bleeding ink, stamps, markings, cursive writing and typewritten text on the same page.

One of the clearest examples involves America's founding generation.

The National Archives and National Park Service are working to transcribe Revolutionary War pension and bounty-land files connected to more than 80,000 men and women. Those records can contain military units, dates of service, residences, marriages, deaths, family histories, letters and diaries — details that can be invaluable to historians and families researching their ancestry.

There is also an important distinction often lost in the cursive debate.

Government archives do not primarily need people who can produce beautiful cursive handwriting. They need people who can read it accurately.

And historical cursive can be considerably harder than modern handwriting. The National Archives specifically teaches volunteers how to recognize older letter forms, including the “long s,” which modern readers can easily mistake for an “f.”

AI may eventually become much better at this work, but it’s not there yet.

For now, human readers remain an important verification layer between a photographed document and a searchable historical record. Without transcription, a document can technically be available online while much of the information buried inside it remains difficult to discover through an ordinary search.

Schools are beginning to respond to the broader decline in cursive literacy. At least half of U.S. states now require elementary-school cursive instruction. New Jersey joined that movement with a law signed January 19, 2026, requiring students in grades three through five to learn both how to read and legibly write cursive. North Carolina has required cursive instruction aimed at legible writing by the end of fifth grade since 2013.

There are legitimate debates over how much classroom time cursive deserves and whether cursive itself provides cognitive advantages beyond handwriting generally.

But there is another reason to teach it that requires no disputed neuroscience.

A nation that cannot read its own handwriting eventually becomes dependent on machines — or a shrinking number of people — to interpret its history.

Angelina Jolie's note may simply be difficult handwriting. The thousands of handwritten pages sitting inside America's archives present the same problem on a far larger scale.

About the Author

Samuel López is a reporter and news correspondent for USA Herald, covering the news for the publication since 2022. A seasoned legal professional with more than two decades of experience in the legal and insurance sectors, López has spent his career analyzing state and federal litigation and working through complex legal matters where the paper trail decides the outcome. That background gives him a working respect for original records, handwritten ones included, and for the people who keep them readable, searchable, and trustworthy.

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