Brian Miller is only comfortable writing about things he’s confident he knows enough about. Let’s humor him.

Here’s some free advice: ditch your notebooks and switch to loose-leaf. It might seem like ‘tomato, tomahto,’ but it’s not.

Notebooks are commonplace in the world of school supplies, and they have been since you were forced to learn cursive for whatever dumb reason. Eventually we all realized that cursive sucked, but for some reason we kept the notebooks.

For me, that meant years of frilly edges on ripped out pages, poor attempts at combining subjects in one place, and backpacks overflowing with notebooks, notebooks, notebooks. And I really hate it when I can’t fill the whole thing, or when I need to start a second, and I’m left with 12 extra pages that I can try, and probably fail, to put to good use.

Then one day I went to Office Max and bought 10 packs of loose-leaf for $10. I was forced to change my note-taking habits and I never looked back. Now I carry one folder for loose-leaf and another for each class or two, cutting my backpack load by approximately 35 percent (no math went into that number). Any class period that needs notes gets a new sheet of paper with the date in the corner and a spot in its folder.

Need more reasons? Notebooks are sort of expensive, especially any of the multi-subject variety. Also, I look really awesome when I hand in something hand-written and it doesn’t look like I chewed it off of the spiral. Finally, it’s absolutely practical for your notebooks and folders to have the same colors, wrestling or Katy Perry theme. However, some people think that is lame and add another complicated layer to their note-taking by mixing and matching. There’s nothing embarrassing when you use loose-leaf.

So, skip the five-dollar, three-subject, too-complicated pile of notebooks. Switch to loose-leaf.