My favorite pens

A story at Lifehacker about thin, bookmark-friendly pens made me think about my two favorite writing utensils. I spend a fair amount of time either taking notes or marking up pages, and I’ve found a couple of pens that work great for me.

The Uniball Signo RT Micro Gel has a 0.38mm tip that makes absolutely the thinnest lines I’ve ever seen from a ballpoint pen. It’s gel-based ink doesn’t seem to ever glob up or drip, and it writes on all but the shiniest papers. If you don’t like narrow tips, avoid this pen. It’s also worth noting that the medium version of this pen sucks. It delivers much too much ink to the paper all the time. Unlike many narrow-tip pens, this one moves very well across the page, only digging into the paper if you actually press pretty hard.

The other pen I use is a Marvy Le Pen in green. It’s a very basic shape and color, but works on virtually everything I’ve ever tried it on, and its very fine 0.3mm tip lets me cram a lot of comments into a small space, whether I’m proofing pages or editing copy. The plastic tip delivers a little more ink than the Signo, and it’s barrel shape makes it a bit uncomfortable for extended writing tasks, but it’s a great editing pen, and it comes in a variety of colors.

Both are relatively cheap, so when I inevitably lose one, I don’t want to kill myself.