A few months ago I began reading a packet of letters from the
Great Depression. They were handwritten in cursive by Ruth
Cross, a native Texan who borrowed and bartered her way into
building a country house in Litchfield County, Conn. Or perhaps
I should say that I began trying to read them, because
deciphering her letters at first seemed a hopeless task.  I was
facing the same problems that jam up computers—which are
notoriously poor at reading cursive. First, the individual
letters that make up each word are often connected to each
other, and it is not clear where one letter stops and another
begins. A space between letters usually indicates the start of a
new word but may also just be stylistic. Second, each writer has
his or her own style of writing, usually pretty consistent
within and across writing samples, but not always. And third,
writers tend to get sloppy. Even they may not recognize what
they have written.  Bit by bit, I figured out the missives of
Ruth Cross. Now I can breeze through them.  But