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Comment by fifilura | Hacker News Reader

My tip is to use white paper. No lines no squares, just white.

In Sweden you were expected to use paper with squares but it adds a lot of clutter.

I was once taking a real analysis class and there was a very gifted student in my class. She pulled out her notebook one day at a study session and I noticed it was kind of unusual - the pages were very large, and made of a somewhat thicker material, with a slightly rougher texture. Ink also seems to set onto its surface slightly nicer, and it doesn't really bleed through onto the other side either.

She explained to me that it was actually a kind of notebook specifically for artists, and that she much preferred it to the normal plain paper notebooks you typically get.

I bought one myself, and I had to agree with her - it was a much 'nicer' experience to write on it - diagrams could be way less cramped, branch out without hitting the edges. The tactile feedback due to the thickness of the paper was also nice - in a way, it felt like the "mechanical keyboard" of paper notebooks.

Never switched back again after that, and many people I work with have found it curious and nice to work with too.

Part of me feels that there may be more than just a gimmick to this. In the way that it's been shown that pen and paper help for understanding versus typing, I wonder if "the niceness of the pen and paper experience" would have an additional tangible positive effect, too

This is famously how Maryam Mirzakhani worked as well. Huge thick A2 sheets where she doodled and did computations; she said she disliked the cramped style of normal notebooks.

Interesting. Do you have links, with pictures, specifications, purchase options etc?

I bought some in person at a store but try looking up 9x12 mixed media heavyweight art notebooks. Typically they're spiral-bound, too.

I used plain for a few years but it has some problems. I now use faint lined paper. Usually Muji notebooks. I leave a blank line between each statement. The lines are handy if you want to make something readable and well aligned which is fairly important. Scans fine.

My kids were forced to use heavily marked blue squared paper. They had problems writing and reading. I pointed this out to their mathematics teacher and said that it may be detrimental and got a diatribe of “what do you know”. Such a bad attitude. I had an answer to this which was embarrassing to him.

Engineering Paper FTW (for the win):

https://www.amazon.com/Tops-Engineering-Computation-Punched-...

I assume most middle school teachers specify how papers should be organized in binders and labeled with names, dates, etc; but below was my method I developed halfway through college:

Top Margin use: left - name, center - class, right - date

One binder per semester; a divider for each class; handouts, tests, etc were hole-punched and placed with my notes in chronological order.

If my notes didn't make sense as I was copying down what the professor did, I would rewrite my notes later that day while figuring the problem-solving process out and making the notes/arithmetic easier to follow.

This method also applied to non-math-related classes.

I love engineering paper too! My weapon of choice is this pad: https://www.rspaperproducts.com/products/95182/ I have not tried the Tops yet, I think because I saw somewhere it was thinner? I like the slightly thicker paper the buff pads come with, and it plays nice with my fountain pens.

Worth nothing you don't need squared for mathematics. Not even slightly. Most of the stuff is written in English with a few lines of other stuff between.

I don't think I needed squares for any of my notes. Graphes that I drew were just approximate. The squares are great for indentations, lists, tables, etc. My notes always looked sharper on engineering paper than regular ruled paper.

I've gone through so many phases on this. But lately, the more writing intensive my math classes get, I've settled on lined paper.

Blank paper is too... Blank! And I'm more prone to write big and messy and waste pages (even though it's all digital)...

Agreed. I did a pure math degree where most of my classes involved copying down 2-3 pages of axioms/proof per lecture, and I settled on mead letter size college ruled spiral notebooks, and yellow note pads for scratch work. Wide ruled led to too much wasted space, graph paper was visually busy and led to awkwardly spaced letters, dot paper just didn't really work. Smaller paper sizes didn't end up holding enough information per page, spiral binding was best for being able to rip out and toss pages, the perforation was nice for the occasional hand in sheet, and I had no need for a nicer quality paper.

Also I always kept Pentel Twist Erase III mechanical pencils with 0.5 mm lead, Hagoromo chalk, and a 4 color set of chunky expo markers in my bag.

I switched to plain white when I was ca 20 years old and never looked back. I need to use plain white since then and I am so used to it that I find lines or grids slightly offensive to me and it throws me off from layouting. You can get used to anything.

Pencil boards can help. An example: https://www.jetpens.com/Hobonichi-Accessory-Pencil-Board-for...

Grid or lined, placed underneath thinner blank paper (heavier paper won't let the lines or grid show through as easily, if at all). Keeps the final presentation neat while giving the structure you may need to keep things aligned.

I agree. However, I have had some good experience using weakly dotted paper for math. Then it is easier to draw graphs by hand.

Here is an example, 4 different dot sizes:

http://trondal.com/p1.pdf http://trondal.com/p2.pdf http://trondal.com/p3.pdf http://trondal.com/p4.pdf

You need to print them to see which one is suitable.

Squares are pointless unless you're drawing graphs, but lines are very handy to have. Without lines my writing moves on an angle and the size of everything becomes inconsistent and usually too large.

I like squares because they allow me to align things vertically.

This is especially useful when maintaining two margins to write in as well as for indenting, blockauotes, or sometimes maintaining parallel lists or columns.

Yeah that is quite obviously the strength of a paper with rulers.

But if you just slightly misalign your lines it will look even uglier.

You'll just have to learn to draw straight lines. Or trade one benefit for the other.

You can always do dot grid paper.

Not in Sweden. In the 90s...

Also, when I look at the prices on amazon.se it looks like they cost around 5-10c each, a bit hefty for a student.

Another note, it was actually surprisingly difficult even to get a hold of blank paper notepads in Sweden in the 90s. At least cheap enough. The cheap ones were all lines or squares.

Even today for students constrained financially, they can print out a dot grid on blank printer paper, perhaps in a faint blue or grey to recreate the effect.

You get a nice mix of benefits of blank paper and graph paper.

that's right with mechanical pencils written on a proper writing surface with plenty of arm/elbow space with real erasers for completely removing noise from mistakes.

Yes. the lines become distracting and constraining.

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