Penmanship used to be a topic of instruction in school. It hasn't been for quite a long time. Even in the 1970s when we still had to write in cursive, we didn't

Penmanship used to be a topic of instruction in school. It hasn't been for quite a long time. Even in the 1970s when we still had to write in cursive, we didn't spend time learning to make it elegant, with a lot of flourishes. We just learned a very plain standard form of writing. By high school everyone had diverged a bit with their own personal style but nothing like the writing of the 19th century. I once visited a high school where they had a wall of signatures from every graduating senior going back to the 1920s or so. The "personality" evident in the signatures showed a steady decline, from very stylish in the oldest ones to mostly just poorly printed names in the 2020s.