Free Viewing of CliffsNotes

For those of you unacquainted with them, CliffsNotes on literature are study guides for important works of literature. Typically, a CliffsNote contains info about the author and the work, a summary with commentary, analysis, character analysis, a couple of critical essays, and some study helps. CliffsNotes are often written by scholarly authorities. My dissertation advisor, for instance, wrote the one on Emerson.

Rightly used, CliffsNotes can help a student study a literary work and understand it better. Wrongly used, CliffsNotes have aided many a desparate and/or lazy student by letting them fake their way through class or a paper.

The very first semester I taught, I caught a girl who had plagiarized out of CliffsNotes. I flunked her on the paper and told her she couldn't use CliffsNotes like that. So on the next paper she plagiarized out of Monarch Notes (a CliffsNotes clone). Sigh.

I would *never* advocate that students use CliffsNotes wrongly, but for those right-thinking students who want to understand better what they are reading, I'm happy to announce that CliffsNotes now has over 180 literature guides online for free viewing.