Quite so.
That’s nice that people still have pen pals. I had two (male) pen pals in the US in the early 90s.
It was just a bit for fun for 2-3 years. They were always fabulous at writing very interesting letters about their lives. Goodness knows what I wrote to them and whether they could read my scrawls.
Have you ever met any of your pen pals?
Great I can now psychoanalyse you! Handwriting analysis is an old hobby of mine 
Yes, a few. Sheila in SA, Bonni in USA & a few here in England. The former two I still correspond with but most of the English pals I met have passed away. I still write to a few I’ve never met.
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If so, then please don’t tell me. 
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If I take my time mine is passable but apart from lists when I go shopping I hardly write much now and you get out of practise which is a shame
I was looking at the Deeds to my house recently…its a very old house going back to the 1700s and all hand written beautifully done script with no mistakes…a dying art for sure.
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Same here. I haven’t handwritten anything for ages not even a shopping list.
Weren’t registrars expected to have good handwriting?
Not sure about registrars but I worked in a chemists when I was much younger after leaving school and I remember the doctors handwriting on prescriptions was barely legible its amazing people got the right medication 
I was told that their handwriting had to be that way so that it can’t be forged.
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My handwriting hasn’t got any worse, it was crap to start with and still is, an expert would detect a lot of impatience embedded in it, init.
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Mine can be excellent if I have the time and I concentrate; otherwise it’s a barely legible scrawl.
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Pictures of a woman’s handwriting before and after medical school. Beautiful and neat before and slightly better than chicken scratch after.
Multiple people said the same thing happened to them. There’s no time to write nicely in medical school so their handwriting gets worse and worse.
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Not only medical school. All of my time going through uni for engineering masters was intense to say the least. I became SO stressed, I bought myself one of the early Philips cassette recorders and then played back when time permitted. Philips was my career saver 
This from the Registrar at my mother’s birth. Not the most elegant I may say…
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You can just imagine the registrar with his dip pen screeching across the page as he writes! Ink on his fingers too. The style of writing shows confidence in what he writes though. Just my thoughts on reading it.
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Yes, I remember the inkwells at school. I still use my fountain from time to time.
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I agree. I’ve checked my documents and saw that the quality of the handwriting varies, indeed. Might also depend on what kind of documents were filled out. Maybe I kept those ancient deeds with a clear, somehow impressive handwriting in mind.
Here’s a more recent example dated 1901.
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…and the protective sleeves he may have been wearing.
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My handwriting is absolutely atrocious tbh. I make a GP’s prescription writing look like a Caligraphy masterclass.
