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[Emrys]

56. Like many of these anecdotes about the world of work and "the younger generation",

this one raises issues about companies' recruitment, interviewing and induction processes, and their own often unspoken internal culture and "we've always done it this way".

In a previous thread a couple of weeks ago, inductees were being blamed for issues that showed up systematic shortcomings in the companies' methods and attitudes to new employees.

I mean, in what sort of company is it acceptable to routinely say things like "We had to let 50% of the new intake go because of ...." before the suspicion arises that the companies are interviewing the wrong people, conducting interviews in non-productive ways, falling short in their induction processes, leading to lost time and money, heartache, frustration and ill feeling all round, and maybe making unrealistic and sometimes unidentified and unspecified demands on recruits?

I edit books for a living. "Cursive" covers a hell of a lot of handwriting styles. I've edited books that had extensive prior annotation in cursive, and one book that was literally a manuscript - all 400 sheets of it written by hand in cursive, which I had to decipher and edit in a way a typist could follow.

One book was a revised edition of a parents' guide to British public schools. Without being familiar with that rarified sector of the elite, we were faced with the problem of whether the scribe's f symbols were in fact p symbols - e.g., was the school called Uffingham or Uppingham? And I was taught cursive with rather extravagant ink pens designed to "improve our handwriting". As most people do, I gradually changed and personalized my own style, often loosely based on the forms I was taught, so there really is no recognized or recognizable standard.

If someone in a firm is routinely producing handwritten material - and you have to ask why they're doing that nowadays when electronic alternatives are readily available - the onus should be on the writer to ensure their handwriting is easy and clear to interpret by others: just as when I used to have to write corrections, changes and instructions for typesetters on hard copy, my publisher employers would not have been happy if I submitted work that was hard to read and decipher. The typesetter wouldn't have been seen as at fault, I would have been. The style I adopted as a result was less than cursive, more like printing, with the letters separated for clarity. I doubt any younger people would have had serious problems reading it.