I'll admit it: I hate the very idea of SparkNotes. I'm not fond of anything that promises great results with minimal effort...weight-loss pills, most items sold on infomercials, and so-called "educational" products that are really flashy marketing tools. If you're going to spend the time it takes to read the SparkNotes, why not just read the actual text again and see if it makes more sense the second or third or fifth time you read it?
Because that takes effort. And school, evidently, is not supposed to require more effort than it takes to produce the desired grade, or so some of my students want to believe.
My biggest problem with SparkNotes, besides the fact that they encourage lazy academic habits, is their lack of quality. The writing style is atrocious, the content shoddy, and the analysis superficial at best. If they just provided summaries, that would be one thing, but their summaries include analytical (and I use the term very loosely) commentary.
Not that I can convince my students of this, by the way. They refuse to believe that scholars won't put their work out on the free internet. They refuse to believe that SparkNotes is a marketing tool (how they can ignore the multiple ads from companies like TMobile that take up half a page is beyond me) and think it's a happy little service provided by nice helpful people. Riiiiiiiiiight.
I went and checked out their offerings on Henry V today because I'm teaching the play in a few months. It was predictably crappy. I'm just waiting to see how much of SparkNotes' "analysis" shows up on the final exams in November.
I've written my own synopses of each act of the play that I'll put up on my website in handy-dandy .pdf files. I wonder how many of my students will pick me over Spark!
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