You know who has horrible handwriting? Zombies, that’s who!
in this discussion you need to be careful to dot your i’s and cross your t’s.
This might be funnier or more pointed if you remembered that it was called the “medial s” because it never appeared at the beginning of a word (with a few archaic exceptions for you nitpickers).
Apropos of the medial s, this bit from The United States of America by Stan Freburg is pretty funny - relevant reference at about the 2:30 mark.
No it was called medial s but it never appeared at the end of words. Senegoid used it correctly.
My father used to chuckle about the 18th century document on “How to cook a ſuckling pig”… 
I suspect that a lot of people simply ha little or none of the education to write, let alone legibly. By the time you write the equivalent of a book, your penmanship has likely improved quite well through practice. As anyone whose tried fountain pen or clligraphy will attest, it is also difficult to get good results because the nib and the paper misbehave. without practice, you may not lift the nib enouh and will leave trails, get blotches, etc.
the other big advantage of typing (on paper or screen) is that you can usually type faster than you can write. This is true with ballpoints - I imagine it was even more true with dipping quill pens, and even more again now that electronics can keep up with your fingers without jamming like the old Underwoods.
You’re right, I’m wrong. My apologies.
Here’s a page from Thomas Jefferson’s autobiography, in his own handwriting. It’s legible, but not perfect. He left a lot of t’s uncrossed.
I walk in the path of greatness.
Well, now they’re in high school 
Aside from work they do in the classroom, I have seen only one high school assignment that one of them was required to write by hand; the others are in Word.
I long ago got a historical library summer job where the sole criteria for rating applicants was ability to discern handwriting. You do have to look for words that are written clearly, and compare the letters in them to harder-to-discern parts. But that’s obvious rather than a matter of training.
Better? Not on average. Different? You bet.
I don’t think 1750 handwriting is radically better or worse than 1950 handwriting. But 2014 handwriting is certain worse than 1950 handwriting, because, as has already been noted, people now have less practice at it.
Check out Thomas Jefferson’s draft copy – his penmanship was nothing special. Much like many modern writers, he intermixes cursive and block lettering. I like where he tried make UNITED STATES OF AMERICA look fancy and important… in a wandering, uneven way.
Scroll down through this page, and look at the handwriting on post cards,
Almost without exception, they feature beautiful, graceful handwriting, and they were written by fairly ordinary people – certainly not by professional scribes who wrote documents for a living.
Dammit. I was going to make a “brainf” joke but of course, this is right.
Skill comes in penmanship like anything else: practice, practice, practice. Both its development and its retention.
I was probably among the last generation of kids to actually have “penmanship” as a subject in elementary school, in the mid 1970s.
In my high school years (early to mid 1980s) I was still allowed to turn in handwritten papers for many classes, though by senior year I was was required to hand in typed or printed (dot matrix) papers for some of them, and all of them in college in the late 1980s/early 1990s.
Back then, I was able to handwrite a draft of a 20 page paper, edit it by crossing parts out, then copy 20 pages out all over again in a final form to turn in (with some use of Wite-Out). All in one sitting.
Nowadays I can’t handwrite more than two or three sentences - about as much as will fit on an index card - without my hand cramping up.
It’s also a general social perception of style as a cultural manifestation of your identity. Just like the architecture of buildings and the ornate clothing that people wore and the furniture in their houses. A high priority was placed on giving the appearance of having style. This has been replaced in recent years by utilitarianism.
Pretty much how it ended up turning out
Thank you. In fact, right from the opening paragraph in Exapno Mapcase’s Wiki link:
Note also the rule about a double ss in the middle of a word:
Note, though that Jefferson seems not to use the “long ſ” mostly. Although in that page from his autobiography, he uses it in “neceſsary” in the third line.
I saw one of the original copies of the Magna Carta when it was displayed in San Francisco a few years ago. It was in Latin, of course. I could barely make out any of the words or letters, except for a sporadic few here and there. It wasn’t that I don’t know Latin (which I don’t); I just couldn’t make out what very many of the letters were.