A Treatise Against Spiral Notebooks

Spiral notebooks are a common thing to find in the hands of students, and they are ubiquitous on store shelves during the "back-to-school" commercial cash-in. Many class syllabi include spiral notebooks by name in their class requirements, while I detest them.

Spiral notebooks experience the following problems:

• They have a finite length. If you run out, you must carry two, but more commonly there is plenty of wasted space at the end.
• They have no modularity. At best you can tear pages out, but that further decreases the capacity and is always messy (leaving a trail of chaff behind either on the paper itself or in a thin strip on the spiral).
• You cannot reorder pages, mix, or match.
• The contents are limited solely to the included notebook paper unless you make a mess of 8.5x11 paper with crumpled edges.

Small three-ring binders (~one inch) offer the following advantages:

• The potential for organization is greatly increased since anything hole-punched can be included in any location among the loose-leaf paper.
• You can freely add paper as you need and reallocate leftover blank sheets when you are done.
• Pages can be reordered or even rewritten if necessary.
• Papers can be taken out and put back in indefinitely.
• Many binders offer folder pockets, and you can add hole-punched folders to the rings. This adds significant organizational capabilities, potentially becoming an all-in-one solution for managing an individual class’ papers and keeping desk space usage (and fumbling with materials during class!) to a minimum.
• Binders are quite a bit more resistant to being bent than notebooks.

I include this list in all my one inch binders in case I need to justify my substitution. Fortunately, I have never had issues with my binders. I'm glad too—my system of separate binders with folders for each individual class has kept me quite organized.

Writing is Hard

Writing is hard. The act itself is not difficult, no matter the medium. Finding the right words usually isn't too hard either. I have trouble hammering out something to say when I don't actually have anything to say.

On this blog, until now I've gotten lucky. (Yes, this post "just got meta.") If I am working with a subject that actually interests me, I can synthesize text with ease because the thoughts come naturally. Papers merely explicating on research are already frustrating, but I am really up against a wall when I am expected to draw some conclusion or offer my own thoughts if there is little pertinent thought in my head to begin with. For the same reason, outlining and other pre-writing techniques don't help. "Discuss some issue of personal, local, national, or international concern and its importance to you."? No thanks.

It's difficult to articulate how I feel when I look at a blank document and mentally calculate: 0 out of 4 pages completed. I press on. 1/15 of desired length. My head hits the desk a few times. Repeat an indefinite amount. Then it's 3 am and I'm lamenting looking forward to sleeping tomorrow instead of tonight. Length not yet quite to assignment expectations; quality far below personal expectations.

An analogy would be to be told that you must get in front of an audience and speak--only on this subject, meeting these criteria, for [amount of time] minutes. Here's this scenario in screenplay format:

(screen pans to SUBJECT's face)
LEADER: You have been selected for today's drill. Proceed to the podium and speak to your fellow subjects on the subject of alpaca breeding habits, refraining from any use of technical jargon and including your own personal reflection, for 10 minutes. Begin.
SUBJECT: (10 minutes of blank stares, nervous twitching, "Uhhhhh...", etc.)

This is Oscar material. I just need to write the rest of it.