You got me writing 'vacuum' and 'anniversary' in cursive, and got so conscious about how I write it that my speed crawled to a stop and my handwriting got even worse than what I started with, lol!
In casual writing, I separate out v, w and other letters that are trickier to write in full cursive. Same goes with t, i, j so that I can do the crosses and dots before moving on.
All those seems to have done the job of making my cursive a bit easier to read. All hell breaks loose when I need to write really fast though.