If you can read cursive, the National Archives would like a word.

Or a few million. More than 200 years worth of U.S. documents need transcribing (or at least classifying) and the vast majority from the Revolutionary War era are handwritten in cursive – requiring people who know the flowing, looped form of penmanship.

“Reading cursive is a superpower,” said Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington, D.C.

She is part of the team that coordinates the more than 5,000 Citizen Archivists helping the Archive read and transcribe some of the more than 300 million digitized objects in its catalog. And they're looking for volunteers with an increasingly rare skill.

Those records range from Revolutionary War pension records to the field notes of Charles Mason of the Mason-Dixon Line to immigration documents from the 1890s to Japanese evacuation records to the 1950 Census.

“We create missions where we ask volunteers to help us transcribe or tag records in our catalog,” Isaacs said.

To volunteer, all that’s required is to sign up online and then launch in. “There's no application,” she said. “You just pick a record that hasn't been done and read the instructions. It's easy to do for a half hour a day or a week.”

Being able to read the longhand script is a huge help because so many of the documents are written using it.

“It’s not just a matter of whether you learned cursive in school, it’s how much you use cursive today,” she said.

Cursive has fallen out of use

American’s skill with this connected form of script has been slowly waning for decades.

Schoolchildren were once taught impeccable copperplate handwriting and penmanship was something they were graded on.

That began to change when typewriters first came into common use in the business world in the 1890s and was further supplanted in the 1980s by computers.

Still, handwriting continued to be considered a necessary skill until the 1990s when many people shifted to email and then in the 2000s to texting.

By 2010, the Common Core teaching standards emphasized keyboard skills (once taught as “typewriting”) and no longer required handwriting on the presumption that most of the writing students would do would be on computers.

That led to a pushback and today at least 14 states require that cursive handwriting be taught, including California in 2023. But it doesn’t mean that they actually use it in real life.

In the past, most American students began learning to write in cursive in third grade, making it a rite of passage, said Jaime Cantrell, a professor of English at Texas A&M University - Texarkana whose students take part in the Citizen Archivist work, putting their skills reading old documents to work.

For her generation, “cursive was a coming-of-age part of literacy in the 1980s. We learned cursive and then we could write like adults wrote,” she said.

While many of her students today learned cursive in school, they never use it and seldom read it, she said. She can tell because she writes feedback on their papers in cursive.

Some of her students aren’t even typing anymore. Instead, they’re just using talk-to-text technology or even artificial intelligence. “I know that because there’s no punctuation, it reads like a stream of consciousness.”

It’s an uphill – but by no means impossible – battle to become comfortable with reading and writing the conjoined script. And it opens up access to a wealth of older documents.