1. Course design: how to use the course most effectively
2. Technical considerations: how to configure your browser

The course lessons are designed to introduce students to a wide range of hands from the period 1500-1700, and to present a fair sample of the kinds of palaeographical problems that will crop up in manuscript research. It is often the case that practical experience of a subject or skill is the best kind of training; this is nowhere more true than in the development of a facility for early modern handwriting.

Jumping directly into reading manuscripts can, however, seem overwhelming. A few pointers for the beginner:

• Beginners will likely want to start at Lesson 1 and work methodically through the whole collection, taking full advantage of follow-up links out to other manuscript images along the way. More experienced transcribers looking to refresh their skills may prefer to sample a few lessons of varying difficulties to find out which level suits best. It may also be desirable to scan through the lessons to focus on a particular type of hand or the writing of a given half-century.
   
• Have a pass at the manuscript before you resort to the alphabets; while a given hand may appear entirely impossible at first, applied codebreaking will begin to yield up patterns of usage. A particularly good way to start with any difficult manuscript is to identify common, simple words ('the', 'of', 'she', 'lord', etc.), and to note idiosyncratic letter formations that will help to make sense of the rest.
   
• When you do turn to the alphabets, match the letter forms there, one by one, against the forms you have noted in the manuscript at hand; you will often find that you need to adjust the way you recognize certain letter forms, concentrating on strokes that you may have thought incidental, but are in fact integral and indispensable. For example, most of the form of secretary minuscule 'h', and certainly the important part, happens below the line; new readers will take a while to adjust to this shift in focus.
   
• Make frequent use of the zoomed manuscript images, especially when looking at individual letter forms. This window can be accessed, collapsed, and reactivated easily at any point in your transcription. Frequent resort to it will allow you to emphasize the stroke-by-stroke recognition of letter forms, which will be particularly helpful early in your transcribing career. The zoom function is also, of course, necessary when you are facing off a difficult deletion or otherwise thorny tangle of strokes.
   
• Unless you are using the lessons for review and your skills are already fair or advanced, turn to the test only when you have had a full go at the manuscript. The slate of questions furnished on each test are designed to test your fluency and to lead you to reflect on good practice. You may also like to read through the manuscript again, more trippingly, after you have completed the test, as it will undoubtedly have raised your awareness of certain special considerations in a given manuscript with implications for the entire document.
   
• For the first few lessons, study the 'dating and describing' section carefully, and try to follow at least some of the discussion points through to the manuscript before you. Try to think critically: would you have chosen other features as noteworthy? After you have begun to feel comfortable with the language and content of the 'dating and describing' section, make some attempt to draw up your own assessment before turning to our provision, and then match yours to ours. If you think yours is better, send it to us!
   
• Before you exit the lesson to the follow-up or to the next lesson, take a moment to compare your own transcription -- whether online or on paper -- to the model provided. While you may have made different (but consistently different!) judgments on procedure, your own transcription should look fairly similar to ours. If not, go back to the manuscript and follow it through using our transcription. If you still find this challenging, make sure you use the 'follow-up' materials. Should you find yourself utterly at a loss, you can always trying writing to us for suggestions.

If there are other topics that you feel ought to be covered in this section, please write to us.

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There are a number of technical points to consider in using the course lessons effectively. Because lineation and other formatting can be somewhat variable in an html-based environment, and yet so crucial to the transcriptional models and tasks on this site, it may be necessary to fiddle around with your browser settings to make the English Handwrting course run smoothly. Chiefly important is monitor resolution: you must be maximizing your lesson windows in at least a 1024 by 768 resolution. If you are working at a lower resolution, you will not be able to accommodate all the information in the lessons comfortably, and indeed some of the material will not appear to make sense (!). This is a regreattable but necessary condition of using the course online.

The other main restriction on the use of the course lessons is that, at present, they are only suitable for PC users running Internet Explorer. This is due to the rich text editing facility in the transcription window, the code for which unfortunately only works in the PC IE environment. As soon as we can find a better solution, we will implement it (if you know of one, please write to us!). In the meantime, Macintosh and/or Netscape users may use anything on the site apart from the online transcription window; a solution might be to collapse the transcription window-frame in your browser and substitute a window from your preferred word processing software (i.e. MS Word, or Wordperfect). Transcriptions can also always be taken by hand, and of course this may prove to be handy practice for those who will ultimately be working in an archive/library environment without a laptop computer.

As with the site at large, many aspects of the course lessons will not perform properly unless your browser has JavaScript enabled. If you are receiving JavaScript errors, check your browser's preferences to ensure that you have enabled Java.

Access to the PDF files associated with the course lessons requires that you install Adobe's Acrobat Reader on your computer. Most institutionally-provided computers will have some form of Acrobat Reader ready, but personal computers may need to be more intensively configured. For further information on Acrobat Reader, and for dowloads, see the Adobe website.

If you have any other technical problems with the course lessons, please let us know, and we will try to address them as quickly as possible.

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