“They overuse the passive voice, then they have a lot of rhetorical questions. “It’s simplistic and it forces people to pay up front.” He found the quality of the writing on Bookwolf offensive. “BookRags is for really desperate people,” he said. Fisher said.īookRags, offered only partial summaries free, and Professor Fisher said what he found there was too elementary. The guides from PinkMonkey _ which also incorporates notes from and Barron’s Booknotes were “the least thoughtful, the least insightful and the most disjointed,” Dr. Some sites did not make the grade at all. zzzzzz!”) and cries for help, (“I NEED HELP**ASAP**ON THE UTOPIAS IN CANDIDE”). The site offers a forum site where students post opinions (on ”Call of the Wild:” “boring. GradeSaver has an editing service as well, with charges ranging from $8 a page for proofreading to $150 to edit an essay of a maximum of 1,000 words within 24 hours. The essays are available through a subscription ranging from $3 for a three days (subscribers are automatically enrolled in the $7-a-month program unless they cancel), up to a one-time charge of $50 a year. It says it also carries 2,715 literature essays. It sells copies of 712 college essays that the site said landed the authors in top colleges. “It makes an interesting attempt to be hip,” he said, “but it is just so high school-y.” It explains the satire in “Candide” by comparing it to modern satires like “The Simpsons” and “The Family Guy.” The problem, he said, is that the writing strains to relate to students. Fisher liked the idea behind Shmoop’s “Why Should I care?” section. Study guides for Advanced Placement and college entrance exams are $10 to $25.ĭr. They are also 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. Guides on topics like civics and economics also are available.Īll of the guides are free online. Berkeley and other top universities” the site still misspelled the last name of Virginia Woolf, the English author. and masters’ programs at Stanford, Harvard, U.C. Among its 600 study guides are guides for best sellers like Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl Who Played With Fire” and song lyrics like Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi,” which it likens to “The Great Gatsby,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” Though Shmoop says the authors come “from Ph.D. It has set itself apart from the stalwarts by synopsizing the expected canon, like Camus’s “The Stranger” and Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” as well as by analyzing more contemporary and popular culture works. Of all the ones I looked at, I’d probably say SparkNotes is the best choice,” he said. “It is a generally useful, more nuanced interpretation than the others. Professor Fisher said SparkNotes’ analysis was more contemporary than that offered on some of the other sites. While those are not available as downloadable PDFs, they are available on iTunes for $4.99 each. The No Fear Shakespeare series, which offers a modern translation next to the original texts, costs $4.99 for each guide. The electronic editions of the guides and downloadable PDFs are $4.95. Most of the guides are available as e-books for Barnes & Noble’s electronic reader, the Nook, or any device that runs Nook software, which is available for BlackBerrys and iPhones, and handsets with Google’s Android operating system. It offers a library of 690 guides, including literature, math, history and biology, all free on the Web. SparkNotes, which is owned by Barnes & Noble and began in 1999, is a newcomer compared with CliffsNotes, but it is well established with today’s students. He looked at notes describing “Candide” in terms of Voltaire’s life and said: “No one does biographical criticism anymore. But CliffsNotes lost points for some dated writing. “If a student wanted to use it along with the text, it would be worthwhile.” He liked that, for some books, the complete text was included with the study guide on line. “CliffsNotes is one of the most thorough, one of the most insightful,” Professor Fisher said.
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