Recently, I’ve been finding the literature being handed to me harder and harder to comprehend. It’s not because I’m a senior and I’m getting lazy, but because with age, comes higher expectations. One of these being to whip out a passage analysis anytime of day on the most obscure pieces of writing. However, this is insanely hard to do if you are confused after reading simply one paragraph of an assigned reading. A helpful resource free and readily available to students is SparkNotes; a website that has anything from full-on summaries to quotation analysis of most books taught in schools. Using this website is ideally frowned upon, but there are multiple situations where the site is more helpful than harmful.

The first situation being if you are behind on reading. I’m not talking twenty pages, I mean like your class is on page three hundred-whatever and you’re stuck on character development. SparkNotes is an easy and fast way to catch up. I mean, you put in some effort; you read the first fifty pages and the last forty (which is where you can pull most of your quotes from, if you’re reading a school book.) It’s not awful to fill in the blanks with a summary or two from the internet.

Another situation where SparkNotes shouldn’t be considered cheating is when you’ve read the whole book, but still can’t tell anyone what it’s about because you don’t know yourself. Been here, and let me tell you, it’s a tough position to be in. You spent all of your time and effort into these words and fictional characters and motifs that you learn later aren’t even motifs at all, and it’s all for nothing. It is when you reach this point of desperation, my friends, when SparkNotes is the answer. A couple of chapter analyses later, and it’s all smooth sailing. You realize that that random inanimate object was supposed to reflect the author’s view on society and how we as readers can change it. Once you have your little epiphany and dance party, you can simply jot down some notes, and be golden for your in-class discussion the next day.

While I personally do not condone the use of SparkNotes to get out of reading completely, it is a fantastic resource for the absentees and the confused.