Manuscript T

Hi everyone,

I transcribed Manuscript T, which was, on the whole, quite intelligible. I ran through all of the manuscripts, then landed on this one because the handwriting reminded me of Alan Dale's. I'm guessing that it's not his, but I wondered whether it might be from the same period. (Dale's A Marriage Below Zero was published in 1889.)

Once I got into it, I found three peculiarities. First, the author used an underlined, open bracket ( [ ) to signify paragraph breaks. I gathered that these allowed the author to waste less paper, but I wondered why that particular mark stuck. Second, said author used a mark between an ampersand and a plus sign to signal "and." This in and of itself wasn't weird, but the author was otherwise quite formal in her/his presentation. Why only this mark of shorthand? Third, and finally, the revisions were remarkably clean. Some weren't one hundred percent intelligible, but the author chose to revise only single words, not sentences, ideas, or paragraphs. These revisions suggested an alarming clarity: could this author really produce such fluid writing with such little revision?

Wondering whether others ran across similar peculiarities in their own manuscripts,

Erin