Since middle school, I’ve been a staunch supporter of college-ruled paper. I always held in contempt the inferior caste of wide-ruled paper—was there any real reason for the lines to be spaced so far apart?
This year, unfortunately, having played the hapless fool and bought school supplies one day before school started, I ended up with only five wide-ruled notebooks to sustain me for the whole year. Terrible, I know, but the resulting experience only strengthened my conviction that college-ruled is truly superior.
I’ve found the transition from sophomore to junior year rather difficult for a variety of reasons—one of which is the shift from “well I don’t really need to take notes” to “take notes or fail every class.” Especially in a class like AP U.S. History, where a night’s homework is basically reading half of a chapter and then converting obtained knowledge into notes for future reference, it becomes essential that you have as much space as possible to write things down.
But wide-ruled paper, by design, discourages such economic use of space. Analysis of college-ruled to wide-ruled paper shows that the standard width of a line in college-ruled paper is 9/32 inches, while in wide-ruled a line is about 11/32 inches. A seemingly minuscule difference, yes, but this amount is compounded noticeably over an entire page. On a standard eight-inch by 11.5-inch sheet of paper, for instance, college-ruled has six more lines per page than wide-ruled paper—enough to squeeze in that extra paragraph and save the next sheet for another day.
Wide-ruled paper also feels a tad immature. Gone are the elementary-school days of happily scribbling print and cursive across entire pages, the letters spilling generously out of the lines. With high school and beyond comes a certain responsibility, and you must be willing to put effort into your work.
Wide-ruled paper, unfortunately, promotes bad habits that undermine such a belief. The more relaxed spaces provided allow a “clever” student to write little while managing to quickly fill up a page. Not only does this harm the student, but it’s also quite likely that the teacher won’t be impressed either when he or she realizes that your two-page essay is actually only a paragraph with five words per line. Compare that to the style of college-ruled paper, whose tighter lines and capacity for more content exudes a professional quality and efficient design.
If you are currently a wide-ruled kind of person, I’d heavily advise you to consider swapping your alliance. Of course, wide-ruled has its own time and place for use, but sadly high school is not included in the list. Think of it as the Comic Sans font—it exists, but who would ever take you seriously for using it?