Nice calligraphy, sure, but hopefully not cursive. Careless cursive handwriting ends up illegible much, much faster than print handwriting, and relies way too much on context to let you figure out what individual words are for my liking. I've had to ask people who wrote cursive notes with just a couple of words instead of a full sentence what they actually wrote, since I couldn't make out the word without the priming of a full sentence of barely legible scribbles.
My father used to do a lot of research using microfilmed 17th-19th century documents.
Cursive handwriting (combined with often poor microfilm or fiche photography) was an occupational hazard, he got fairly good at interpreting some documents but it might take him the better part of an afternoon to transcribe 4 or 5 pages of journal entries from some documents.
