Our Story from SparkNotes to LitCharts

While SparkNotes does have some information on poetry, such as overviews of major works by one author or essays about another, their focus is primarily on novels and Shakespeare. At “Spark Publishing” we developed hundreds of titles across half a dozen series, including spinoffs like the wildly popular No Fear Shakespeare. We co-wrote a book on the SAT, started another series called
Quamut
(how-to charts for grownups) and then in 2009 we sailed off to try new things, all related to education and technology. All together, the stuff we made at SparkNotes and Quamut now has over 20 million copies in print and tens of millions of users online. We offer more than 500 guides for English literature and Shakespeare, and a vast number of guides for history, math, biology, and other subjects.

SPARKNOTES, owned by Barnes & Noble, offers free study guides for hundreds of literary works on its website. The app version is preloaded with 50 pieces of literature, including poetry, Shakespearean plays, and novels that frequent high school reading lists, such as 1984, Brave New World, The Canterbury Tales, and The Odyssey. When connected to Wi-Fi, kids also can access all the site’s library titles, easily downloading them to their devices for offline access. Each title includes a plot overview, background information about the author and the work, a character list, and analysis, including explorations of themes, motifs, and symbols. Kids can read a detailed chapter-by-chapter summary, explanations of important quotations, and lists of key facts and study questions. Though teachers and parents generally frown on kids using study aids such as SparkNotes without reading the full text, used well these particular resources can help teens better understand and analyze the literature after reading it.

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

A study guide for a novel includes summaries and analyses of the chapters, key questions and answers, a plot overview, a video of the plot summary, and a section that helps explain the ending of the novel. The SparkNotes website includes a sub-brand called No Fear Literature, featuring a wide range of classic literature side by side with a simple English translation. These translations are available both online and in book form at book stores such as barnesandnoble.com. SparkNotes is a resource for students to turn to when you want to understand a book in-depth. Their mission is not only to help you to understand books, but also write papers, and study for tests, presenting all the info you need in a clear and concise way that includes all of the important info. Their website also offers key questions and answers to popular topics in novels and plays, as well as the full text of classic novels, such as Great Expectations and Jane Eyre.

Haunted by what he has done, Macbeth is once more reprimanded by his wife, whose inner strength seems only to have been increased by the treacherous killing. The SparkNotes website currently receives about 20 million visits each month, with website users spending over 5 minutes on average reading around 3 pages each visit. To read more about LitCharts, check out our page on Why LitCharts Are the Best Literature Guides on Earth. And if you’re already a LitCharts user and have feedback for us, we’d love to hear from you by email, or on
Twitter
or
Facebook.

Sparknotes: Review & Analysis

Here, you can find helpful advice and test-taking strategies for the SAT, Praxis, ACT, GRE, GMAT, and many other tests. We had thought LitCharts would be just a side project to scratch a lingering itch, but with so much support from students and teachers all over the world, it’s become a passion and a business. Those twists made all the difference though,
and when the dot com boom turned into the dot com crash in early 2000, SparkNotes had millions of devoted users, and emerged unscathed. We joined up with Barnes & Noble, became 23-year-old book publishers overnight, and built a print publishing operation to complement the SparkNotes website (which was now serving over 1 billion pageviews per year).

Students can take advantage of their quizzes to help with information retention and No Fear Shakespeare, a popular resource for side-by-side translations of Shakespeare into contemporary English. SparkNotes, originally part of a website called The Spark, is a company started by Harvard students Sam Yagan, Max Krohn, Chris Coyne, and Eli Bolotin in 1999 that originally provided study guides for literature, poetry, history, film, and philosophy. Later on, SparkNotes expanded to provide study guides for a number of other subjects, including biology, chemistry, economics, health, math, physics, and sociology.

What Does SparkNotes Offer?

Our most popular guides now include quick quizzes, so you can test your retention before the test. One of Poem Analysis’s best features is its collection of best poems and poets. These lists help readers quickly learn about the best poems in a poet’s oeuvre or the best poems ever written on a particular theme, like friendship or nature. Poem Analysis contains 4,320 analyzed poems, many of which come straight from school syllabuses around the world.

Readers can explore themes, symbols, literary devices, information about the author’s life, the historical context of the poem, summaries, line by line analyses, and more. Additionally, if there’s a piece of information that’s unclear or something that a web user would like more information on, the comments section allows readers to easily communicate with Poem Analysis’s expert team of writers. For some of Shakespeare’s more popular plays No Fear Shakespeare also offer teaching guides designed to help classic literature engaging and relevant to today’s students. These teaching guides are in old school print format only, and available to buy from Barnes & Noble. As with the NoSweatShakespeare ebooks, No Fear Shakespeare modernized versions of Shakespeare make reading the plays much easier.

William Shakespeare

Until 2022, when SparkNotes Plus, a paid service, released, SparkNotes did not charge users to use any of its resources. No Fear Shakespeare is a book series and set of Shakespeare study guides from SparkNotes. The book series offers modern English translations of most of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. Aside from the translations, SparkNotes have over 500 free study guides that contain summaries, characters, themes, quotes, and insightful critical analyses of authors and books – everything from Beowulf to Game of Thrones. It’s quite easy to find the information you’re looking for on Poem Analysis. Each poem has a dedicated page, table of contents, and material that is meant to help you easily and quickly understand the verse you’re learning about.

• On their website, there are summaries and critical analyses as well as around 500 guides to English literature and Shakespeare.
• The SparkNotes website includes a sub-brand called No Fear Literature, featuring a wide range of classic literature side by side with a simple English translation.
• A perfect opportunity presents itself when King Duncan pays a royal visit to Macbeth’s castle.
• The app version is preloaded with 50 pieces of literature, including poetry, Shakespearean plays, and novels that frequent high school reading lists, such as 1984, Brave New World, The Canterbury Tales, and The Odyssey.

Although initially prepared to wait for Fate to take its course, Macbeth is stung by ambition and confusion when King Duncan nominates his son Malcolm as his heir. What more, the Poem Analysis brand has continued into books, with Book Analysis. With this site, you’ll find summaries, analyses, and reviews of books, such as The Catcher in the Rye, with a whole range of information on each author too. We’re Ben and Justin, the founders of LitCharts and the original editors of SparkNotes. We were part of a small group of 22-year-old Harvard grads on a mission to take out CliffsNotes, the behemoth whose little yellow-and-black books dominated the literature guide market for decades.

Parents’ Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

The SparkNotes library is extensive, with hundreds of titles available, and includes most high school and college reading lists. Parents may appreciate using the app as a way to refresh their memories of the works their kids are currently reading (or to get an idea of the work if they’ve not read it themselves). Students may even find inspiration in some of the ideas they read, bringing their own insights into class discussions and analytical writing. On SparkNotes, readers can get access to physical and online study material, as well as resources for eReaders. On their website, there are summaries and critical analyses as well as around 500 guides to English literature and Shakespeare. Although those are the subjects they’re the best-known form, SparkNotes also offers study guides for history, math, biology, and more.

Returning to his castle, Macbeth allows himself to be persuaded and directed by his ambitious wife, who realizes that regicide — the murder of the king — is the quickest way to achieve the destiny that her husband has been promised. A perfect opportunity presents itself when King Duncan pays a royal visit to Macbeth’s castle. At first Macbeth is loth to commit a crime that he knows will invite judgment, if not on earth then in heaven. Following an evening of revelry, Lady Macbeth drugs the guards of the king’s bedchamber; then, at a given signal, Macbeth, although filled with misgivings, ascends to the king’s room and murders him while he sleeps.

We also have lots of general information about Shakespeare’s life, family, homes in London and Stratford, theatres, and use of language. Plus we have a Shakespeare blog that covers some of the fun and modern-day takes on the Bard of Avon. Over two-thirds of their users come from North America, with other English-speaking countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and India making up the bulk of the remaining users. CliffsNotes can help you prepare for whatever standardized, professional, or proficiency test you need to take.

Additionally, Poem Analysis offers a dedicated list of literary terms, which currently contains 888 terms explained. Readers will also find information about 1084 poets, numerous nursery rhymes, and idioms. CliffsNotes study guides are written by real teachers and professors, so no matter what you’re studying, CliffsNotes can ease your homework headaches and help you score high on exams. At a celebratory banquet that night, Macbeth is thrown into a state of horror when the ghost of the murdered Banquo appears at the dining table.

Again, his wife tries to strengthen Macbeth, but the strain is clearly beginning to show. Set in medieval Scotland and partly based on a true historical account, Macbeth charts the bloody rise to power and tragic downfall of the warrior Macbeth. Already a successful soldier in the army of King Duncan, Macbeth is informed by Three Witches that he is to become king. As part of the same prophecy, the Witches predict that future Scottish kings will be descended not from Macbeth but from his fellow army captain, Banquo.