For What Is French Ruled Notepaper Used?

[Anne-Sophie]

Also some teachers were very very controling and wanted to chose the color of your cahiers/notebook for each subjet.

 

They were also neat freak and wanted us to buy protege cahier (see description in Clarefontaine catalogue) in the color matching their subjet so at the end of the day, there was a neat pile of cahiers looking the same.

 

We used the little label holder to write our names.

 

I didn't like that at all, and keept telling them, when I was in the smaller grades, that I couldn't wait to get bigger so I could choose my own system.

 

 

I have never been a fan of notebooks, there is no way to organize pages, if bought them too thin, they lasted a month; if I bought them too thick I had to shlep lot of useless weight.

 

 

I lobbied very strongly with my teachers to a shift from cahiers to classeur (notebook to binder).

 

I think the last straw was when a teacher forced us to buy a very heavy notebook. She made us write two different subjects for the same class from each end of the notebook. I think it was French and one side was for grammar and one was for vocabulary, something like that.

It drove me crazy. Of course we did more grammar than vocabulary, at the end of the year, I was left with a cahier with unused pages right in the middle.

(It was a Clairefontaine notebook, and I was not happy about wasting such expensive paper so when another teacher got the same idea, I started removing the center pages of the notebook and use them as copies doubles (small size)

 

"The petite feuilles a grand carreaux" they are the size of the classic Clarefontaine notebook.

"Grand feuilles a grand carreaux" are Seyes ruled sheet of A4 paper (roughly letter size)

 

"Petit carreaux" are grid ruled pages like Rhodia.

Edited June 6, 2007 by Anne-Sophie

[ssossatt]

A few notes on the Czech (or Czechoslovak, at that time - mid 1980s) education system:

 

We had to use fountain pens at primary school for the first four years. So using a ballpoint pen later on was experienced as incredible liberty. Many people started loathing fountain pens due to that early experience.

 

A truly horrible thing I remember from school was that we had to make the margins - left and right - in our notebooks ourselves. That meant measuring them, making holes through the whole notebook with a pin and then drawing them in pencil with a ruler. It took ages to make the margins of all the thick notebooks (maybe 10 or more) at the beginning of the school year! What was worse, I never understood the purpose of those margins - except that we were not allowed to write in them. They were not used for any specific purpose by the teachers. It was all just meaningless suffering! The whole family of the child usually helped to make those margins.

 

All the notebooks were provided by the state in the early years, later they were prescribed: what size, how many sheets etc. There was not much choice anyway - just one or two state producers of stationery had monopoly over the whole market. No, they did not produce notebooks with margins.

Edited June 7, 2007 by ssossatt

[Stylo]

Also some teachers were very very controling and wanted to chose the color of your cahiers/notebook for each subjet.

 

I see this thread is still going.

 

When I was in 7th grade, I had a super-control freak math teacher. I can't remember whether we had to use ballpoints for his notes, but we had to use red and blue ballpoints for underlining and writing certain headings. There was a whole system of single & double underlining various headings, in red and in blue. I think sometimes the heading had to be red, underlined in blue, and the other way around too. I also remember that when he walked through the aisles and noticed someone who wasn't doing it right, he would just rip the page out of the notebook!

 

A few years later, I heard he had a terrible car accident, and that he mellowed out after that. Perhaps that put thing in perspective for him.

 

[Reisho]

I have never been a fan of notebooks, there is no way to organize pages, if bought them too thin, they lasted a month; if I bought them too thick I had to shlep lot of useless weight.

 

Strange, I've always had the opposite feeling. To me a binder was something whose pages could be lost and I hated them.

The only thing wrong with the notebooks were those awful "protège-cahiers" (plastic covers) we had to put on them. The transparent ones were kind of OK, but the opaque ones were the ugliest things.

 

"The petite feuilles a grand carreaux" they are the size of the classic Clarefontaine notebook.

"Grand feuilles a grand carreaux" are Seyes ruled sheet of A4 paper (roughly letter size)

 

I still do my work on Seyes Clairefontaines. They are a bit larger than the A4 ones you mentionned. I'm not sure this size already existed when I was going to school, but anyway I highly doubt they would have allowed such a non-standard format.

 

I wonder if your Nouvelles Galeries are the same as mine. I distinctly remember the stationery being on the ground floor (it's currently on the fourth if my memory is correct )

 

Reisho

[tfwall]

Thanks Anne-Sophie! After reading this thread a few weeks ago, I up and ordered 2 spiral and cloth bound notebook by Clairfountaine along with a bottle each of Violeete Pensee and Poussiere de Lune from Pendemonium.

 

I've been using one of the spiral notebooks extensively this week and have been impressed with it. I like how easy it is to get uniform indenting for notes with the Seyes ruling. Someone noticed yesterday that I wasn't using "normal" paper and asked where I find fountain pens in this day and age.

 

I haven't had good results with lightfastness for the Violette Pensee, but both are nice colours on the page.

[brigsy]

What an interesting thread. I have saved a few bits and bobs to try out.

 

Cheers people.

 

 

[Garageboy]

Wow, nice insights

Here, we just used a workbook with dotted lines as a guide..maybe thats why my handwriting is horrid

[Anne-Sophie]

Actually, I am very impressed by the French and German school systems, compared to ours here in the USA. I will never forget visiting a German classroom equivalent to one of junior high school levels. Every student had their orderly pen and pencil case, full of sharp pencils for both writing and drawing and either a Geha or a Pelikan fountain pen. Each also had their neat pile of graph paper. No cries of "I don't have a pencil!" or "Can I have some paper?" that one hears every day in an American classroom. Everyone was prepared.

 

 

I was always prepared too and usually had extra sheet of paper, my mechanical pencil and a regular one for backup, 2 fountain pens and cartridges, I also brought specialty paper and ruler kit for math and physics class as well as a big set of pencil for science and geography class.

 

I cannot tell you how often somebody was asking me for this or that because they forgot to bring or buy a particular item. This went on during all my schooling and some classmates were worse than others.

When I needed to stop a moocher in a particular class or grade, I usually "forgot" items myself and would ask of the moocher to return the favor, if the moocher was reluctant she was given a lecture at recess.

 

Some tried to forget to give me buy my things and one of them stole my better/more expensive Waterman school pen.

 

 

 

[navygators]

Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you who spent the time to explain Seyes and french ruled paper.

 

I have been looking for this paper for ages and couldn't remember what it looked like precisely. I learned to write in North Africa with a fountain pen on what I now know to be french ruled paper. My children are learning to write and I can't stand their primary school paper options.

 

With my mother heading to Europe, I desperately tried to explain to her what the paper looked like. If only I had known! She came back with dozens of German notebooks. I'll be ordering the Clairefontaine notebooks for my sons as they have already expressed an appreciation for the fountain pen ( I had to order those online too....)

[Celeste]

Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you who spent the time to explain Seyes and french ruled paper.

 

I have been looking for this paper for ages and couldn't remember what it looked like precisely. I learned to write in North Africa with a fountain pen on what I now know to be french ruled paper. My children are learning to write and I can't stand their primary school paper options.

 

With my mother heading to Europe, I desperately tried to explain to her what the paper looked like. If only I had known! She came back with dozens of German notebooks. I'll be ordering the Clairefontaine notebooks for my sons as they have already expressed an appreciation for the fountain pen ( I had to order those online too....)

 

did you find the link to the grid paper generator for French ruled that will let you print it at home?

[gylyf]

Unless I'm very much mistaken, Seyès is the name of the man who developed the rule used in France. The idea behind the rule was to normalize handwriting amongst French students: the lines dictate the height of the letters, in both directions. I was raised on this paper and it's still my paper of choice; habits die hard. Here's an example:

 

http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f370/metafacticity/untitled.jpg

 

Best,

David

[rogerb]

I am a newbie to the forum and have just discovered this thread, while researching the best notepaper to use for some letter-writing I need to do.

 

I read with increasing astonishment about all the different types of lines in schoolbooks.

 

Maybe it was English post-War austerity, but, once we had learnt (more or less) to write, we only ever had exercise books with single wide or narrow lines (except for specialised use like graphs), usually in a pale blue.

 

We were expected to write between these, with the bottom of the 'middle-zones (such as 'a' and 'c') touching the line, and the loops not tangling with those above and below!

All indenting was done 'by eye'.

 

We started with pencil, then to dip-pens, until secondary school, when we were allowed FPs filled with blue or blue-black. I recall having a few nice Watermans & Conway Stewarts, which I usually managed to wreck

I coveted the Parkers with the colourful 'ringed' pattern, but made-do with a clone called a Skater, brought home from Hong Kong by an older brother!

 

Many teachers required us to rule pencil margins on both sides of all the pages, a very tedious task when one got a new exercise book!

 

My mother taught me that it was very infra dig to write letters on lined notepaper...fortunately Basildon Bond pads came with 'guide sheets', as I'm pleased to see my recently-bought Velin de France paper also does

 

 

[thibaulthalpern]

How very interesting, this thread!

 

I grew up in Ghana. While I didn't go to the government schools, I think my school had similar standards with regards to writing. Both systems followed the British education system. I remember for each subject per term, we received two notebooks. One was marked "Classwork" and the other "Homework". These notebooks were rule-lined notebooks with two staples down the middle to bind them. The cover was a thicker stock paper that said something like "Ghana Schools" on it. The Homework book was were we did our home assignments and we turned in the whole notebook for correction. Classwork was for notes taken during class. Oh yes, we also had a small "Assignment" book in which everyday we would copy the homework assignments for every class in it. We were also issued a pencil and ruler by the school. The school also loaned us the textbooks which we were required to wrap in paper before use. We returned the books to the school at the end of the year.

 

I don't remember how we were taught penmanship but I do remember that from Class 1 to Class 4 we were only allowed to write in pencil. Then, from Class 5 upwards, we were only allowed to use blue or black ballpoint pen. I can't remember if we were allowed pencil in maths class but I think not. We were introduced to Tipp-Ex which was how we "erased" our mistakes. The idea, I think, was that "you're a big person now" so you need to be careful and not make mistakes. Something like that. This was back in the 1980s. We didn't use looseleaf pages and binders like Americans did. The teachers also never xeroxed anything because, well, we didn't have that technology widely available so many things we copied from the blackboard to our notebooks.

 

This thread has made me remember all of this which is so far from my reality today, over some 20 years ago! And now I'm living in the U.S.

[freznow]

Do american and french school kids write on the same ruling all the years?

 

I might not be the best person to answer for American kids, as my "kids" are adults now.

 

In the early grades, the paper is turned landscape (sideways) and ruled with a rather wide rule, but I don't have the dimension. Also there is a dotted (or faint) centerline between baselines. It is the height used for body characters with no ascenders, c, e, m, etc. Ascenders and descenders are midway to the appropriate centerline or baseline, by eye, no line for guidance.

 

Later, they use paper in normal portrait orientation with only baselines ruled. Normally a wide rule is used in elementary grades. In high school and beyond, people would use a narrow or wide rule according to preference, where a narrow rule is about 0.25" or 6 mm. Various wider rules exist, 0.375", 8 mm, or 9 mm, based on brand and country of origin. One popular brand, Ampad, offers three rules, narrow, 1/4"; college 9/32"; and wide, 11/32" (6.3 mm, 7.1 mm, 8.7 mm).

 

This is basically my experience. I'm young, still in high school, so I probably have a fresh look on what the modern way is. I remember the really wide landscape paper. It was typically an ugly brown rough paper, like bad newspaper. The baselines were light red, the middle line was light blue, and there was lots of space everywhere. They were really wide. In the middle of elementary school years, we start to use wide ruled notebook paper. The lines were light blue, and there was a margin on the left hand of both sides as well as a margin at the top. The teacher made the rules on what you could do. The most strict would say no writing outside of the margins or on the last line of the piece of paper. I remember one teacher subtracted points if you went over the right side margin. But it's a hard to see margin, as you have to see it through the paper. But all in all, in America it's pretty loose. These days in high school, some teachers have rules but most things are just handed in on whatever loose leaf paper you have. College ruled is encouraged and sometimes required, but not always. You can use whatever note book you want and the biggest peeve of most teachers are the random scraps on the left side of a page when you rip it out of a notebook. Which is why perforated pages are now extremely common. Things get more strict when you have to type them (and much of the time, you HAVE to type it. No more hand written stuff!) There's many rules for that. As for handwritten stuff, most of the time you can often use any color pen or pencil you want "As long as [the teacher] can read it." I've written with crayon before. Many teachers correct with purple or green or whatever. Except for scantrons, those have to be #2 pencil! Though I hadn't seen a fountain pen in real life before I got one myself.

 

When I was young, many things had to be done in pen, a few things (math, mainly. Which still has to be done in pencil) could be done in pencil. These days more and more everything has to be done in pencil except formal essays, I hear, when dealing with elementary schoolers. My friend's sibling actually got points taken off for using pen! But that's in elementary school. As I said before, high school is really very loose. As long as it's legible, they don't care if it's cursive or print (though cursive is quickly becoming extinct).

 

In the end, the American schools I have been to may not have been strict enough, and that may explain a few things, but the French way described in this thread sounds awful.

[musorah]

Thanks for a fascinaing read.

 

In the US, Zaner-Bloser and D'Nealian styles of handwriting tend to be taught in the primary grades. As there is no national curriculum, there are different options in every state and even from school to school.

 

Here is a link to some of the ruled paper available. In the primary grades, the rules are usually wider spaced and the paper is of a lower quality - it is still advertised on these pages a s newsprint.

 

Remember that American "letter size" is 8 1/2 inches by 11 inches as opposed to international A4 which, translated to Imperial measure, is 8.25 X 11.66. American "wide ruled" is lined at 3/8 inch and "college" ruled is lined at 9/32 inch.

 

On page five of the above site, there are some practice pads:

 

Learn-To-Place, Learn-To-Write & Learn-To-Space Pads

 

Ruled white newsprint pads with a chipboard backing and a protective front cover. All have thick green baselines, red broken midlines, green headlines and skip spaces. The new Learn-To-Place includes dashes above the baseline that serve as a guide for letter placement and spacing. Learn-To-Write and Learn-To-Space include a red left margin and Learn-To-Space has the added feature of red vertical spacer bars to assist with word positioning. Sheet size is 10-3/4" x 8-1/4", ruled one side and 100 sheets per pad. Recycled and recyclable.

 

Handwriting is still taught, but it may be squeezed out more and more as testing in the basics becomes more important. I hope not! As word processing becomes more and more predominant in the upper grades, examinations like the International Baccalaureate, where exams are written longhand in pen on paper, become more difficult for students who have not practiced legible handwriting for the previous five or six years.

 

Rick

(American, taching in an international school)

Edited January 1, 2009 by musorah

[lovetheduns]

I am excited by this thread. I plan to order some Clairfontaine French ruled papers-- I LOVED these notebooks and papers when I was a student in France during my junior/senior year of high school.

 

I will never forget those first few days of school when I used my regular American paper-- everyone thought I was nuts and I thought they were nuts with their pencil sacks full of fountain pens and inks of all colors, coloring pencils.

 

I will never forget being in math class with these french ruled papers and lazily drawing a square when my maths teacher came up to me and pointed out that my square was definitely not a square and more like a rectangle- she thought I could not understand her so she proceeded to draw the difference on my paper. I pointed out to her that I had labelled the sides as 6cm and 6cm so I knew it was a square-- the French were by far neater and more exact in their school work than any American student.

 

I loved my time there-- I should dig up some of my old school papers while in France and compare my handwriting then.

 

[Flourish]

French Lined, Seyer, Paper is for learning. Learning to write properly, something which we in this country have forgotten to do long ago. That is except for those of us with an interest in fine writing implements like fountain pens, I should hope. And dip pen users too, even more so for them I'd say.

 

The nasty newsprint tablets we use in schools here in the states are an utter disgrace and hinderance to any proper form of handwriting. How many of you remember that useless dead center dotted lined stuff that crumbled under the tip nib or ball of your pencil or pen as you repeatedly just wanted to figure out how to write an A B or C? I had to switch to magic markers to write on that stuff, wasting two or three pages for every page I wrote on due to bleed through along the way to my god awful handwriting. If I could I would start a class action suit against our government and school system because of the flippancy with which they have treated our greatest resource, our children, which we were once also.

 

We have been convinced, I'd go so far to say brain washed, to believe that our penmanship doesn't matter. We've even gone so far as to use computers to print out our letters in the fanciest scripts because we have no idea how to learn to do so ourselves. And here's something to think on. Most of the most influential words ever written were handwritten by people who spent years with pen to paper thinking upon each and every word before they even began to write them down.

 

I'm sure we've all seen examples of the hand written word throughout the ages and from different cultures. I don't know abut you but the one thing that I have noticed is that even the worst hand writing throughout the ages that I have come across still far surpasses anything that most of us could even hope to accomplish today. Then again we have TV's, the internet, computers, cell phones and video games, so who the heck needs to think for themselves and write well anymore anyway? We'll just work our butts off to pay someone else to do it for us. Unfortunately, that someone else is doing the exact same thing we are so we don't really get much that is helpful from them anyway. Ah, forget it, I gotta go pay my Dish Network bill so I can watch me some survivor antarctica (It's guaranteed to be the most exciting season ever!), and get me a new cell phone cause I love to hear myself talk without every really saying anything. At least with a computer you can type to your hearts content and maybe just maybe once in a while you'll spell a word or two right and form a proper sentence or two, upon occasion.

 

Good penmanship gives a person time to think about what they are going to say in what they write. And as a persons writing improves in style and speed so do their thoughts. When a person achieves a style of handwriting they enjoy and is legible to others there is a pride of accomplishment and a confidence that shows through in everything they write. This also spills over into everything else they attempt to do in life.

 

So get yourself some Seyers and a good book on scripts and go to town.

 

P.S.- How many of us can actually, in a good legible script, write in a straight line on an unlined piece of paper using even margins top bottom and sides? Your answers will pretty much sum up everything I Just said above.

[Flourish]

Well wouldn't know I made a typo and on the most important word in this discussion. Figures. I better go get some Séyés paper and get back to my educational needs.

[Duckiputz]

French ruled note paper is paper that has been subject to Norman conquest.

 

Hmmm, but then it would be Norse-ruled

 

So, in that spirit:

 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b7/Hagar_Family_Christmas_20061225.png

[Atlas]

AFAIK its just regular writing paper. I'm using it for note taking, writing on every second line. It looks very neat, go and try it!

 

I'm curious how having some vertical lines running down the paper makes one's writing look neat. My suspicion is that if someone's writing isn't neat, nothing magical will happen when they use paper with vertical lines. Nevertheless, you only said that it looks neat, not that it is neat, so perhaps that French-ruled paper is just pleasing to some peoples' eyes. For myself, I can't imagine why. The less cluttered the paper is the better. If someone can write neatly on blank paper, that's wonderful. If not, then lined paper would be the next best choice. Hopefully they do not have to resort to French-ruled paper or graphing paper.