You might recognize it: Its lines are about 1.25 times thicker than normal, college-ruled paper. It’s also one of the most horrific banes ever unleashed upon this world, up there with Jell-O salad and pharmaceutical ads — it’s wide-ruled paper.
Not only is it objectively less efficient than normal paper, but it even trains people’s writing to be worse. Wide ruled paper is ostensibly intended to help children improve motor skills and handwriting, but instead, they get used to wasting space and writing too large.
Once their writing has been distorted this way, it’s much more difficult to return to normal, college-ruled paper. While wide-ruled paper may be better for kids in the short term, kids ultimately need to get used to college-ruled paper, as this is the paper they’ll (hopefully) be using throughout their lives.
At the end of the day, wide-ruled paper isn’t just an inconvenience — it’s a downgrade. It wastes space, dulls handwriting and lures you in with a flashy notebook design, only to betray you the second you open the cover. If we’re going to fill our shelves and backpacks with paper, it should be the kind that makes our writing better, not worse. If people need the extra space that badly, they can just skip lines as they write!
