Tips for reading a Patrick McKenzie essay: 1. Get a laser printer Sorry, Amazon, but the truth is that staring at the flickering, dancing lightbulb that you c

Tips for reading a Patrick McKenzie essay: 1. Get a laser printer Sorry, Amazon, but the truth is that staring at the flickering, dancing lightbulb that you call a computer screen wears the eyes, and can lead to serious sleep disorders. e-ink readers are okay but, for an essay of this magnitude, there's still nothing that beats good old fashioned ink-on-bleached-woodpulp. And don't even think about using ink-jet. For the price of the ink, you could hire Patrick for a full one week consultation. 2. Paste the text into a wordprocessor If you're au fait with LaTeX you don't need my help here. But for the rest of us, a word processor is the way to go. And, for you Windows users, bypass WordPad and go straight to MS Word (if you have it) or LibreOffice Pages (if you don't). Either is fine. (In the past, I would would have suggested WordPad in a pinch, but LibreOffice is free and has important features that we're going to make use of.) Now, at this point, you'll encounter a technical snag. If you just blindly copy and paste the text into your word processor, the formatting will come out all messed up. This is because Patrick uses '90s style tables for website layout. This is no big deal -- just go to the webpage, open up the developers' console, and copy-paste the text one table-cell at a time -- but you need to be aware of it. 3. Find and tag the section headers There are usually 4- or 5- section headers in the text. Pick them out, and tag them as section headers. 4. Style your text If you're a design maven, go knock yourself out here. The system I've found that works for me is: - typeface: Arial Condensed 6 point (hate it all you want, but it's free and it gets the job done) - page layout: minimal margins, 3 column - paragraph style: 1 cm indent, no leading or trailing space, full justification For the section headers, I allow myself a generous 9 points bold font size. 5. Check your printer Make sure you have plenty of printer ink and paper available, because this is going to be a big job. And make sure you're not going to need the printer for anything else for a while. 6. Print! By the way, don't attempt to take a Patrick McKenzie essay with you on a plane: you'll exceed your in-flight handluggage allowance.