Why Do Many People Have Atrocious Handwriting?

As someone who often gets complimented for my legible, neat handwriting, I never fully understood all the praise for doing the bare minimum--for doing something that I instinctively and easily do on a daily basis. Many consider penmanship to be a skill, but for me it's sort of in a gray area. It shouldn't be considered a skill to do something so seemingly basic that everyone who goes through some form of education performs, but it depends on the kind of penmanship or writing styles too. For example, I believe that calligraphy and precise writing utensil control are skills. The visual satisfaction that calligraphers give through their elegant letters and movements is not a common occurrence that most people could do. In addition, precise writing control involves micromovements and attempting to make each letter equal height, equal spacing, equal line weight, etc. It just depends on what specific penmanship or writing style is truly considered a skill. However, many do not think about this approach because messy and illegible handwriting is so common that what constitutes "normal" or "standard" penmanship is considered a "skill" by many. Why do some people have atrocious handwriting?

    Before I proceed, I will refer to people with messy and illegible handwriting as those who have received Kindergarten through High School education. It makes no sense to be questioning the penmanship of those who cannot afford or access education and have barely had any opportunities to write with a utensil. Second, I will define "standard" handwriting as text with at least 90-95% of its letters having clear bodies/strokes that make it easy to identify. The first image above is not standard handwriting because most of the letters do not have defined strokes and spaces between each letter.

    If you take a look at the Manuscript Alphabet picture, you can clearly see how easy it is to just draw simple curves and down or side strokes. "I have messy handwriting because I write fast" is not a valid excuse to have messy handwriting more than half of the time. I know a lot of people including myself who can relatively write fast and still have a standard or even satisfying penmanship. It takes practice to be good at practically almost everything. Writing fast whilst having legible penmanship is not an impossible task--practice makes perfect. To say the "I write fast" excuse for poor handwriting is to convey to people with excellent penmanship that you are either 6 years old, a person who has barely written in their life, or someone who is not, in fact, practicing to rid of that mistake.

    

    There really isn't much left to cover. I mean, if you take a look at the second picture again, no one is asking you to write calligraphy, write in cursive, draw heiroglyphics, or write in Chinese, Korean, or Japanese (which are examples of languages that require more technique than English for drawing strokes and characters). Has no one taught you how to trace letters in kindergarten or pre-kindergarten? Didn't they give every student worksheets of handwriting practice to learn how to write? Does anyone remember that pinky rule where, after you finish writing a character, you place one of your pinky fingers next to the character you just wrote to learn how much space should go in between each character? All in all, it's really just simple lines and curves.