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It is embarrassing to see basic grammatical mistakes in a letter from a university:

Type a 5-6 research paper...

What is a "5-6" research paper? Even sadder is the officious and petty tone:

The paper must be in 12 point font, Times New Roman, double-spaced with one-inch margins...

I know what my response would be: two words, one page, 150 pt font.



Bam! I was thinking the exact two same words. That would be awesome if the dude did that. He could pay-per-view when he hands in the paper -- I'd pay to see those sanctimonious assclowns get owned by this guy. These are the kinds of students you want in your school -- creative, a little rebellious and intelligent. Of course, the admins want good little worker bees that adhere to proper margins and typography.

I would be tempted to even dust off the 'ol Comic Sans just for this. They definitely wouldn't deserve a real font.

Yes, I realize he'd likely get kicked out of school, but when Wired does a story on the guy, he won't have any problems getting into a better school.


In the spirit of assignment, since they don't specify the kerning, you could just s u b m i t y o u r .. you get the idea. (HTML is going to eat them, but pretend like there's a ton of space between each character.)


Heck, they don't specify the page size, merely the margins.


Feeding post-it notes through a printer might be difficult though.


They said 'type' not 'print.' He could use a manual typewriter.


Altough it's rather hard to find one that is writes in Times New.


You can probably find times new roman typeballs out there for IBM selectrics.


Print post-it-sized virtual pages on a regular sheet, cut them up, apply glue.


Once knew a bloke at Harvard who got in a bureaucratic situation where he had to hand in an essay for a class. Didn't have to be good or even pass, just had to be an essay.

So in a fit of rage, he wrote the worst essay he could. Bad sources, bad style of writing, bad grammar, stupid logic, insane conclusion, everything.

Other Harvard students who'd read it told me it was a comic masterpiece.


Go with landscape mode, and you can bump the point size up to 200.

That's about the only thing I'd do differently.


Or, better yet, bump the point size for all the periods in the doc up to 200.


I would print it with white text on a dark, thick background, using the Dean's office laser printer.




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