SparkNotes study guides free online
by Rob - December 4th, 2006.Filed under: Uncategorized.
We Canadians grew up with Coles Notes; Americans are used to Cliffs Notes, Barron’s Notes, and SparkNotes or Spark Notes (the brand that Barnes and Noble sells) — study guides for various scientific and historical subjects, or for great works of literature and plays.
Well, the full text of all the SparkNotes are now online for free (you pay only if you want to download a whole book as a single PDF file). A cool reference source, I must say. And they’ve also got all those handy review charts, but you have to pay to download those.
Also free on the same site: a searchable style guide (punctuation, grammar, etc.). Sadly — from my point of view — it agrees with the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, on not italicizing punctuation marks following italicized words, as I wrote about here.
A moment later: Hey, whattaya know! CliffsNotes offers something similar — free online viewing; pay only if you want to download a PDF. Cool!