How to square handwriting variation?

[Skoove]

While this absolutely could mean something, I just looked at some examples or s and r from same page, and in many of them (maybe even more than a half) the upper tip of the flourish starts with a hook, so, at first the quill makes a tiny semi circular motion before going into the main stroke. Make this motion a bit more vigorously and there will be a loop. Also at the bottom center there is an example of what appears like some struggles with the quill from the same page. So, overall, combined with the misalignment of the flourish and the base, I won't bet too much on this being a deliberate shape.

I have actually been thinking about this for a while, that on the first couple of pages, there tends to be less uniformality in the scribes writting. If we are to assume that folio 1 is the first folio written, I think this actually makes sense. Effectively the scribe was the least experienced at this time and so they were still having some issues with writting a script that they weren't that used to writing. Scribe 1 tends to the best handwritting and spacing and by the later Herbal A folios, they don't make so many mistakes.

It is most obvious in the EVA-d, EVA-ch and EVA-y. The flow of these characters seems a lot more disjointed than it does in later Herbal A sections. As such, I think that when we are looking at pages like f2r, we should be expecting a bit more variation in a character that is the same. 

As a side, I wonder to what degree we could leverage this to get deeper into how the script was formulated or at the very least, the way in which the scribe was thinking about each character when writing them.