How to Rip Paper

Ripping paper is a life skill.  Not the kind of ripping where you completely annihilate the piece of paper on these scraggly rips, but the kind of ripping that gives you a clean line where you want it.

I'm thinking that most people already know how to do this, but maybe I'm wrong.  I've seen people who are wholly incapable of making a nice rip, so it's never too late to learn!  For the (hopefully very small) minority of people who want to learn how to rip paper correctly, read on!  There's even images!

First, find a piece of paper that you want to rip (duh!).

Fold it along the line that you want to rip.  You have to crease it well, as in running your fingernail, pen cap, or paper clip over the fold two or three times.  You don't have to overkill on this.  Some recommend wetting the crease with spit or something, but I think that's gross and unnecessary.

Carefully make a small rip along the line at the top of the paper.  You might want to hold the paper in the air and slowly make the small rip.  Or you could hold it against the desk tightly and pull sideways slowly.  Either way, do it slowly and carefully.  If your starting point rip is a failure, turn it around and try again on the other side.  If both sides are failures, then pick the best side you have and move on.  If both sides are epic failures, get a new piece of paper and try again.

The rest is easy.  Just rip down crease from the starting point you created!

Now if that's not efficient enough for you, you can try ripping two pieces at a time.  It's a bit harder and a lot of this depends on the friction between the pages and the friction between the paper and your surface.  I'd say that anything more than three pages is unrealistic and you'd spend more time getting it right than ripping them two or three at a time.

It's pretty much the same as before.  Make your crease where you want to rip.  This time you have to make sure that the crease is better, especially for the paper on the inside, which you can't really see.  Maybe run your creasing tool over it three to four times.

Make that starting rip, but make sure that the rip is good on both pages.

It's not as easy as before, but finishing is still very easy.  You might have to press down on the paper harder to make sure that they stay together and both get ripped at the same time.  If they fall apart, then you can just rip them separately.

Now you know how to rip paper.  It's totally a life skill.