Spark Notes Over a Mathematician Reads the Newspaper
A Professor's Review of Online Cheat Sheets
At this time of year, students are buying textbooks and looking for ways to avoid reading them.
Nothing is new nearly that. CliffsNotes guides, with their familiar yellow and blackness covers, have been in book bags since 1958.
What has inverse is how many study guides, or cheat sheets, are available online and on mobile phones. Whether you know them as CliffsNotes, SparkNotes or Shmoop, these seemingly ubiquitous guides are now, in many cases, gratuitous.
"Two to three years ago, the wisdom was that students do research online, simply not written report online," said Emily Sawtell, a founder of McGraw-Colina's online collaborative study site called GradeGuru. "That has changed in the last 12 months." Ms. Sawtell said she had tracked a significant increase in the search term "study guide" on Google.
Professors warn that these guides are no substitutes for reading neat works of literature, but concede, grudgingly, that as an adjunct, they tin can stimulate idea and deepen insight.
"The problem is when y'all use a study guide in place of the original book," said Cary Nelson, professor of English language at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and president of the American Clan of University Professors. "Then they take noesis that is not just superficial, but wrong."
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Carl Fisher, chairman of the comparative world literature and classics department at California Country University, Long Embankment, agreed to review the many offerings, starting with the oldest. CliffsNotes guides cover not only literature, simply also foreign languages, math, scientific discipline, history and other topics, and many of the guides are free online.
In booklet form, 159 literature written report guides are available, costing most $6 to $10 each. Merely more 250 are bachelor online, and all can be viewed complimentary. Downloading them as PDF files costs $5 to $10 each. A comparatively paltry 39 CliffsNotes for literature are available for mobile at $1.99 each for the iPhone.
CliffsNotes, endemic by Wiley Publishing, also offers free podcasts chosen CramCasts, which are three- to five-minute overviews of books with a plot summary.
"CliffsNotes is one of the most thorough, one of the most insightful," Professor Fisher said. "If a student wanted to use information technology forth with the text, it would be worthwhile." He liked that, for some books, the complete text was included with the study guide on line. Merely CliffsNotes lost points for some dated writing. He looked at notes describing "Candide" in terms of Voltaire's life and said: "No 1 does biographical criticism anymore. They haven't since the 1970s."
SparkNotes, which is owned by Barnes & Noble and began in 1999, is a newcomer compared with CliffsNotes, simply it is well established with today'southward students. It offers a library of 690 guides, including literature, math, history and biology, all gratis on the Web.
Most of the guides are available every bit eastward-books for Barnes & Noble'southward electronic reader, the Nook, or any device that runs Nook software, which is bachelor for BlackBerrys and iPhones, and handsets with Google's Android operating system. The electronic editions of the guides and downloadable PDFs are $4.95. The No Fear Shakespeare series, which offers a modern translation next to the original texts, costs $4.99 for each guide. While those are not bachelor as downloadable PDFs, they are bachelor on iTunes for $iv.99 each.
About 150 of the SparkNotes are still bachelor in volume course for $4.95 each, and the book class of No Fear Shakespeare costs $five.35.
Professor Fisher said SparkNotes' analysis was more than contemporary than that offered on some of the other sites. "Information technology is a more often than not useful, more than nuanced interpretation than the others. Of all the ones I looked at, I'd probably say SparkNotes is the best choice," he said.
Shmoop, though, is the newcomer. Information technology has been online for simply 18 months. It has set itself apart from the stalwarts by synopsizing the expected canon, similar Camus's "The Stranger" and Shakespeare's "Village," besides as by analyzing more contemporary and popular culture works. Among its 600 written report guides are guides for all-time sellers like Stieg Larsson's "The Girl Who Played With Burn" and song lyrics like Lady Gaga'south "Paparazzi," which it likens to "The Great Gatsby," "True cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "Who'southward Afraid of Virginia Woolf." Though Shmoop says the authors come "from Ph.D. and masters' programs at Stanford, Harvard, U.C. Berkeley and other tiptop universities" the site nevertheless misspelled the terminal name of Virginia Woolf, the English author. Guides on topics like civics and economics as well are bachelor.
All of the guides are costless online. They are as well available for 99 cents to $2.99 for the Sony Reader, Kindle and Nook e-readers and iPhone, Android and BlackBerry smartphones using the Nook reader app. Shmoop also sells PDF versions for $five. Study guides for Advanced Placement and higher archway exams are $10 to $25.
Dr. Fisher liked the idea behind Shmoop's "Why Should I care?" section. It explains the satire in "Candide" by comparison information technology to modern satires like "The Simpsons" and "The Family Guy." The trouble, he said, is that the writing strains to chronicle to students. "It makes an interesting attempt to be hip," he said, "only information technology is just so high school-y."
GradeSaver boasts that a majority of its authors are Ivy League-educated. The site offers more than 400 guides covering literature, poesy and short stories, with two film guides. Professor Fisher said that the writing was amid the best. "It is quite readable, if yous can get around the blue jeans ads, which are right in the middle of the text."
The site specializes in essays. It sells copies of 712 college essays that the site said landed the authors in elevation colleges. Information technology says it as well carries ii,715 literature essays. The essays are available through a subscription ranging from $3 for a three days (subscribers are automatically enrolled in the $7-a-month plan unless they cancel), up to a one-time charge of $fifty a yr. GradeSaver has an editing service as well, with charges ranging from $eight a page for proofreading to $150 to edit an essay of a maximum of 1,000 words inside 24 hours.
The site offers a forum site where students mail opinions (on "Call of the Wild:" "tiresome ... zzzzzz!") and cries for help, ("I NEED Assistance**ASAP**ON THE UTOPIAS IN CANDIDE").
Some sites did not make the form at all. The guides from PinkMonkey — __ which also incorporates notes from TheBestNotes.com and Barron'due south Booknotes — were "the to the lowest degree thoughtful, the least insightful and the most disjointed," Dr. Fisher said.
BookRags, offered only fractional summaries free, and Professor Fisher said what he found there was likewise unproblematic. "BookRags is for really desperate people," he said. "It's simplistic and information technology forces people to pay up forepart." He constitute the quality of the writing on Bookwolf offensive. "They overuse the passive voice, then they have a lot of rhetorical questions. Information technology's banal."
He advised students to employ study guides as boosted textile to the books. "Zippo can substitute for the original text," he said.
Professor Fisher also had advice for teachers. "I make my students submit their papers through turnitin.com," which is a plagiarism search engine. He says information technology is very effective at forcing students to offer some original writing, if non some original thought.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/technology/personaltech/16basics.html
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