I have been suffering from a bad handwriting my entire life. In school and uni I would always be afraid, that answers could not be decoded by the person grading the test.

I also thought that the resulting text looked ugly.

Recently I have started to consciously improve my handwriting with great results. The simplest most effective step was to treat every letter as a single entity (in contrast of slurring all letters together into one word).

Of course this takes a little more time, but I now can actually read the results, and I also think that it looks good from an aesthetic point of view. Now I am not afraid of writing christmas or birthday cards anymore (I even bought a fountain pen for this purpose).