Photo Credit: Madeline Drace

College-ruled paper (right) brings with it the potential for success. Wide-ruled paper (left) just looks silly.

Of all the great injustices faced by students—gum on desks, highlighted textbooks, and broken pencil sharpeners—wide-ruled paper is, perhaps, the most egregious.

Wide-ruled paper, when compared to its more sophisticated cousin college-ruled paper, contains six fewer lines.  Six fewer.  Six lines that forever are robbed of their potential.  Six lines that could contain anything: haiku, prose, a more comprehensive Republican budget policy, or a doodle.

And with this loss of lines comes a loss of trees.  Trees, which we need to live, are generally considered to be quite important.  Using the advanced mathematical techniques of addition, subtraction, and multiplication, we have calculated that for every five pages of wide-ruled paper, four pages of college-ruled paper could be used instead.  Thus, it follows that we could use four trees for college-ruled paper rather than five for wide-ruled.  Now it is not our place to say that any school (such as our own) that claims to be environmentally conscious while simultaneously endorsing wide-ruled paper is blatantly lying to the student body and the public.  But if it were, we would definitely say that.

College-ruled paper also possesses a psychological superiority to wide-ruled paper.  While this may initially seem counterintuitive, we encourage you to perform a simple test: place a piece of wide-ruled paper next to a piece of college-ruled paper.  The latter’s compact line-height implies a professionalism, whereas, in comparison, the former’s size is indicative of a pedestrianism, a lack of dedication or clear purpose that is clearly detrimental to any written assignment.

In short, wide-ruled paper is dumb.