@ Vienna: My handwriting is mediocre but legible and always have been. I read things written by the Founders and their contemporaries and I'm amazed at the skills they owned. On the other hand they seem to have written slowly and carefully when it was for public consumption but weren't quite so careful otherwise.
http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/rough.htm
When I was thirteen my mother lived in a trailer park. She commented to me once that the manager of the park had "the most beautiful handwriting I've ever seen." It's a practiced skill, just like anything else.
