I want to find some samples of English cursive writing along with their typed versions. Where can I find this?
This is for practice purposes: I want to attempt to read the cursive version and look at the typed counterpart if I can't discern a certain word.
If you don't mind using older documents and hands, the Library of Congress By the People collections offer many handwritten documents that have been transcribed and reviewed by volunteers. Their completed projects should offer many examples of cursive to interpret alongside their transcription. For instance, here is a partial screenshot of one of General George Patton's World War II diaries along with the transcription:
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (the original second draft)
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
