Normally "o" is written in two strokes... top to bottom on the left, then top to bottom on the right.
There might be a few people who can do it in a single stroke by turning the hand as they go so the angle of the nib is changing with the circle but you'd have writer's cramp after 3 folios of doing it that way and it would still sometimes spatter.
Plus, the thick and thin qualities that are emphasized in some of the more elegant book hands are partly due to doing it in two strokes (the VMS scribes do NOT do this very well).
Here's an example of a bookhand from a French manuscript (they had some good scribes, the Italians were also good). I picked this one because it demonstrates the thick and thin capabilities of a single (moderately wide) quill nib if you hold and pull it correctly:
Note the "o" and the "d". You start at the top, go down and left and come around and stop. Now lift the pen, go back to the top, drop the pen and pull across to the right, and down and around to complete the circle. Each letter is done this way, so you learn a sequence of strokes for each letter.
Pulling toward the side of the nib that holds the ink avoids spatters. That's why you typically start at the top.
This motion gives you thin strokes in the horizontal direction and thick strokes in the verticalish direction except that the hand naturally moves slightly at an angle when drawing arcs, so the thin strokes (of a right-hander) will angle down to the left—you can see this in the thin stroke on the "e".
I don't think of the VMS scribes as professional scribes because they obviously didn't exploit the basic physics of the pen (in terms of using the thick-thin properties) as was done by the best scribes, and they were pretty inconsistent in terms of width, slant, height, etc. (although we don't know if any of these properties change the meaning of the glyph).
They did know enough to avoid splatters, but not enough to avoid fill-in in some of the loops (which is difficult to avoid when the text is very small, but some scribes could do it). There was probably some basic formal training (maybe by a writing tutor?), but not enough to write as well as John Dee, for example. His note-hand was a total scrawl, but his calligraphy hand was pretty good, better than the VMS script.
There might be a few people who can do it in a single stroke by turning the hand as they go so the angle of the nib is changing with the circle but you'd have writer's cramp after 3 folios of doing it that way and it would still sometimes spatter.
Plus, the thick and thin qualities that are emphasized in some of the more elegant book hands are partly due to doing it in two strokes (the VMS scribes do NOT do this very well).
Here's an example of a bookhand from a French manuscript (they had some good scribes, the Italians were also good). I picked this one because it demonstrates the thick and thin capabilities of a single (moderately wide) quill nib if you hold and pull it correctly:
Note the "o" and the "d". You start at the top, go down and left and come around and stop. Now lift the pen, go back to the top, drop the pen and pull across to the right, and down and around to complete the circle. Each letter is done this way, so you learn a sequence of strokes for each letter.
Pulling toward the side of the nib that holds the ink avoids spatters. That's why you typically start at the top.
This motion gives you thin strokes in the horizontal direction and thick strokes in the verticalish direction except that the hand naturally moves slightly at an angle when drawing arcs, so the thin strokes (of a right-hander) will angle down to the left—you can see this in the thin stroke on the "e".
I don't think of the VMS scribes as professional scribes because they obviously didn't exploit the basic physics of the pen (in terms of using the thick-thin properties) as was done by the best scribes, and they were pretty inconsistent in terms of width, slant, height, etc. (although we don't know if any of these properties change the meaning of the glyph).
They did know enough to avoid splatters, but not enough to avoid fill-in in some of the loops (which is difficult to avoid when the text is very small, but some scribes could do it). There was probably some basic formal training (maybe by a writing tutor?), but not enough to write as well as John Dee, for example. His note-hand was a total scrawl, but his calligraphy hand was pretty good, better than the VMS script.
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