Cliff Notes, Can You Use This Term, Registered?

A Professor'due south Review of Online Cheat Sheets

Sept. 15, 2010

At this fourth dimension of year, students are buying textbooks and looking for ways to avert reading them.

Cipher is new virtually that. CliffsNotes guides, with their familiar yellow and black covers, have been in book bags since 1958.

What has changed is how many written report 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, free.

"Ii to three years ago, the wisdom was that students exercise research online, but not study 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 great works of literature, but concede, grudgingly, that as an adjunct, they can stimulate thought and deepen insight.

"The problem is when you use a written report guide in place of the original book," said Cary Nelson, professor of English at the Academy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and president of the American Association of Academy Professors. "Then they have knowledge that is not only superficial, simply wrong."

Credit... Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

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, but as well foreign languages, math, scientific discipline, history and other topics, and many of the guides are gratis online.

In booklet form, 159 literature study guides are bachelor, costing nigh $6 to $10 each. Merely more than 250 are available online, and all can be viewed gratis. Downloading them every bit PDF files costs $v to $ten each. A insufficiently paltry 39 CliffsNotes for literature are available for mobile at $1.99 each for the iPhone.

CliffsNotes, owned by Wiley Publishing, also offers free podcasts called CramCasts, which are three- to five-infinitesimal overviews of books with a plot summary.

"CliffsNotes is 1 of the well-nigh thorough, one of the most insightful," Professor Fisher said. "If a student wanted to employ it forth with the text, it would exist worthwhile." He liked that, for some books, the complete text was included with the report guide on line. But CliffsNotes lost points for some dated writing. He looked at notes describing "Candide" in terms of Voltaire'south life and said: "No one does biographical criticism anymore. They haven't since the 1970s."

SparkNotes, which is endemic past Barnes & Noble and began in 1999, is a newcomer compared with CliffsNotes, but it is well established with today's students. Information technology offers a library of 690 guides, including literature, math, history and biology, all costless on the Web.

Most of the guides are available equally eastward-books for Barnes & Noble's 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 arrangement. 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 $four.99 for each guide. While those are non available as downloadable PDFs, they are bachelor on iTunes for $4.99 each.

About 150 of the SparkNotes are withal available in volume form for $4.95 each, and the book form of No Fright Shakespeare costs $5.35.

Professor Fisher said SparkNotes' assay was more contemporary than that offered on some of the other sites. "Information technology is a generally useful, more 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 just 18 months. It has set itself apart from the stalwarts by synopsizing the expected canon, like Camus's "The Stranger" and Shakespeare's "Hamlet," besides as past analyzing more contemporary and pop culture works. Among its 600 report guides are guides for all-time sellers like Stieg Larsson's "The Girl Who Played With Fire" and song lyrics similar Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi," which it likens to "The Great Gatsby," "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "Who's Agape of Virginia Woolf." Though Shmoop says the authors come "from Ph.D. and masters' programs at Stanford, Harvard, U.C. Berkeley and other top universities" the site all the same misspelled the final name of Virginia Woolf, the English language author. Guides on topics like civics and economics also are available.

All of the guides are free online. They are likewise available for 99 cents to $ii.99 for the Sony Reader, Kindle and Nook east-readers and iPhone, Android and BlackBerry smartphones using the Nook reader app. Shmoop also sells PDF versions for $5. Report guides for Advanced Placement and college entrance exams are $10 to $25.

Dr. Fisher liked the idea backside Shmoop's "Why Should I care?" section. Information technology explains the satire in "Candide" past comparison it to modern satires like "The Simpsons" and "The Family Guy." The problem, he said, is that the writing strains to relate to students. "It makes an interesting attempt to be hip," he said, "but it is just and then high school-y."

GradeSaver boasts that a majority of its authors are Ivy League-educated. The site offers more than 400 guides covering literature, poetry and short stories, with two motion picture guides. Professor Fisher said that the writing was among the best. "It is quite readable, if you can become around the blue jeans ads, which are right in the center of the text."

The site specializes in essays. It sells copies of 712 college essays that the site said landed the authors in tiptop colleges. Information technology says it likewise carries 2,715 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 $50 a year. GradeSaver has an editing service as well, with charges ranging from $8 a folio for proofreading to $150 to edit an essay of a maximum of i,000 words inside 24 hours.

The site offers a forum site where students post opinions (on "Call of the Wild:" "wearisome ... zzzzzz!") and cries for assistance, ("I Demand Assistance**ASAP**ON THE UTOPIAS IN CANDIDE").

Some sites did not make the class at all. The guides from PinkMonkey — __ which also incorporates notes from TheBestNotes.com and Barron'due south Booknotes — were "the least thoughtful, the to the lowest degree insightful and the most disjointed," Dr. Fisher said.

BookRags, offered only fractional summaries free, and Professor Fisher said what he constitute there was besides elementary. "BookRags is for really desperate people," he said. "It'due south simplistic and it forces people to pay upward front end." He found the quality of the writing on Bookwolf offensive. "They overuse the passive voice, then they have a lot of rhetorical questions. It'south bland."

He advised students to use study guides as additional cloth to the books. "Nothing tin substitute for the original text," he said.

Professor Fisher likewise had communication for teachers. "I make my students submit their papers through turnitin.com," which is a plagiarism search engine. He says it is very effective at forcing students to offer some original writing, if not some original idea.