Hi Barry,
If you can work happily at 20wpm that’s already a very good level and all you need to do is to keep making CW QSOs and also some contests to help automatize the copy of the common words and expressions, as well as to improve your hability to copy the full callsign in one go.
By practising, practising, repeating and repeating, you’ll finally learn the typical words in a standard QSOs without needing to copy and decode each and all of the letters and all the typical variations in the standard QSO exchanges.
For contesting and also for a good and rapid clearing of a pile-up in a SOTA activation, it’s very important to be able to copy the full callsign in one go.
Sometimes the morse sending is faster than the handwriting and it’s impossible, at least for me, writing down a callsing on a paper at the same speed it’s been sent. In this cases, what I often do is storing it in my short term memory, then sending it to the correspondant along with his signal report and then write it down on the paper while he is transmitting his QSL GM GURU TKS FER RPRT UR 579 or whatever… Chasers often transmit back again their callsign, which should help you to confirm what you had in your short term memory and then write it down on your paper log without any errors.
Othe thing I sometimes do is store in my shrot time memory just the prefix (mentally associated to the country) along with the number and write down on the paper log just the suffix.
Later, while the chaser is responding with his signalk report, you’ll have the time to write down his preffix and number.
To illustrate this, let me give you this example:
I get called by HB9XYZ, I’ve copied the full callsign as it was sent to me but it was too fast for me to write it down before he finished sending and I want to get back to him before he sent his callsign again, which will slow down the activation pace. What I’ll do is I’ll store in my memory that it’s a standard Swiss callsign (HB9) and I’ll write on the log just …XYZ towards the right hand side of the callsign box in my log because I know I’ll later write the preffix, while he will be sending me his signal report.
I hope this will be of help to you and possibly others.
Should you have any other question, don’t hesitate to ask and I’ll be pleased to share my tricks and experience with you all.
Good luck with your CW practise.
73,
Guru