Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive – How will they interpret the past?

  Well, I learned cursive and I can't even read most cursive text..

Ditto. Anyone who's ever dabbled in genealogy will have come across this fundamental flaw with cursive handwriting. It can be lovely to look at. But also very ambiguous to interpret.

Trying to decipher old birth or death certificates often involves trying to guess what they say. Was Great-Grandad a butler, a builder, a butcher, a banker, a baker... or a burglar?

Often, only the first and maybe a middle letter are identifiable for certain and the rest are just insert squiggle which could be almost anything.

I've long been amazed that, even on such important documents of historical record, clerks were expected to fill in details in cursive, rather than printing each individual letter.

We have turned full circle.

We are introducing modern pictograms ("emojis") to convey very concentrated meaning instead of spelling it out with several words. Eventually those pictograms/emojis will become stylised due to speed with most of the strokes removed and we will end up with a kind of stylised writing which would probably be quite similar in effect to modern Chinese.

Computer people have used

    :)

for a long time.

  >Well, my penmanship (ie, cursive) sucked back then so as soon as I was able to I switched to printing

Same here [if by 'printing' you're referring to handwriting in a non-cursive way].

My English teacher took me to one side at about age 12 and asked me to print in future as he couldn't read my 'joined-up writing' [as we call it over here].

I've been printing ever since. But, over the subsequent decades, my printing handwriting has evolved into a cursive format all my own, which is also an odd mix of small caps and lower case, which join together in various ways. I think it's quite elegant myself, though I doubt my old English teacher would agree.

Anecdata: I was involved in teaching at university level, for quite a few years, and was shocked at how 'infantile' most of my students' handwriting was.

As per above; all of my generation could do 'joined-up writing' even if, as in my case, it was barely legible. But my students' writing was like the clumsy handwriting of children just learning to write; each character printed separately, leaning in all directions and all different sizes. And these were art students who [allegedly!] should have been amongst the more dextrous, when it came to handling a pen.

Not so many years ago, you could make a reasonable guess at someone's age, by their handwriting. Printing for young children, clumsy simplified cursive for older children, more practiced simplified cursive for adults and the older, more involved style cursive for their parents' generation. It won't be long now til everyone is only able to write like infants.

Well, assuming your question is genuine: a cursive F looks nothing like a printed F, a cursive S looks nothing like a printed S [and quite like a cursive R, which, in turn looks not much like a printed R]. Add in various loops etc, which simple [when printed] letters like I and L can acquire in cursive --and someone who's only ever seen those letters in printed form is likely to be very confused as to what they are supposed to be.