engineering paper

Also referred to as "engineering sketch pad" paper. 8.5" x 11" light green paper, 3-hole punched, with shadowy 5-per-inch graph squares in a 7" x 10" inset on the front side and the fully printed squares on the back.

Despite the fact that I am a computer science major and not technically an engineer (at least, not at Virginia Tech), I love this stuff because of the ability it offers you to

• get 50 lines of stuff on a single sheet
• easily maintain indentation
• draw funky-looking geometric figures accurately

It's also fun to piss off the engineers by writing in pen on it, since they were trained to only use pencil on engineering paper under penalty of death in their Engineering Fundamentals class.

The primary draw of engineering paper is not that it looks cool or lets you fit a ton of information onto a page, it's that you can erase on it forever without erasing the lines.

Engineering work, especially if you're drawing schematics or doing a ton of math, is very prone to errors. I make mistakes all the time on my work for various electromagnetics problems or when sketching out some computer architecture problem while being a teaching assistant for a computer engineering class. With engineering paper, you can whip out your big white eraser and scrub that page clean. The paper tends to be sturdy, so it stands up to erasing well, and you can keep using it until you wear clean through to the other side of the sheet.

Engineering paper is pretty reasonably priced, and while it'll make you look strange if you turn in assignments or such on it in a non-engineering class, you'll use much less paper because you won't be throwing out sheets and wasting them when they get too erased on!