Sparknotes
is a product of the advanced technology that we all use every day. Computers
and the internet have been beneficial for students of the past couple of
decades in that they allow for easy access to a wide variety of information,
books, texts, etc. Sparknotes is one such website that students rely on for
summaries and analyses of common and popular literary works. It is a quick and
easy tool for understanding texts, often instead of reading the text itself. I’m
not going to deny that I have used Sparknotes on different occasions and
depending on the text I was reading. One text that I really enjoyed in high
school was Lord of the Flies. The plot, symbols, and themes really grabbed my
attention and I found the story to be very exciting. However, unlike other
stories I read in high school, I didn’t use Sparknotes for this one. I was
actually surprised to find that it was on the website, since I believe that
William Golding uses plain style within the book already. Stories that already
have elements of the plain style in them don’t necessarily need to be on
websites like Sparknotes because while there may be some more complex phrases,
chapters or excerpts, there is enough active voice, less jargon, and quick
sentence openings to make stories like Lord of the Flies accessible to both younger
and older audiences. Has plain style just become a “shortcut” for students and
readers to use in order to have a better understanding of language as a whole?
Sparknotes and other websites could be taking out the beauty if language itself
by simplifying it to basic terms and sentences. It is because of this that I
think Sparknotes isn’t always as useful and relevant as some students come to
think. If the story and its summary on the website have a similar reading ease,
average grade level, and use of plain style, it would be more beneficial to
just actually read the book.
While this book tells a fascinating
story about school boys becoming stranded on an island in a dystopian society
filled with nuclear warfare, and how these boys slowly begin to lose their
humanity and morality, I enjoyed the book even more because it was easy to
understand, but not boring or dull. With Sparknotes, they do give good
descriptions of the plot and summaries of each chapter, but they do it in a way
that makes the story seem much more boring than it actually is. I would argue
that whoever wrote the summaries on Sparknotes didn’t have enough jargon. For
example, the first summary of the first chapter opens with:
“A fair-haired boy lowers himself
down some rocks toward a lagoon on a beach. At the lagoon, he encounters
another boy, who is chubby, intellectual, and wears thick glasses. The
fair-haired boy introduces himself as Ralph and the chubby one introduces
himself as Piggy. Through their conversation, we learn that in the midst of a
war, a transport plane carrying a group of English boys was shot down over the
ocean. It crashed in thick jungle on a deserted island. Scattered by the wreck,
the surviving boys lost each other and cannot find the pilot.”
There
aren’t any words or phrases here that the common student wouldn’t understand,
and that’s why this summary as well as most of the other received an average
grade level of 7 or 8. This excerpt gives a straightforward, cut-and-dry
overview of what the characters are doing and seeing. While I could see where
some students who have more trouble understanding and digging into literary
texts might find this useful, but doesn’t this take away from the creativity
and the visualization of the story? The opening of the book itself received
almost the exact same average grade level as the Sparknotes summary, but
Golding puts life into the words and uses some jargon as a way to paint a
better picture of what is actually happening.
As previously mentioned, there are a
few differences between Lord of the Flies and its Sparknotes companion that
would make students and other readers gravitate toward the website summary. For
example, there are some instances where the author uses slightly more
descriptive and complex imagery for the sake of painting a vivid image of the
events that are unfolding, but also to emphasize the beauty of the language. One
excerpt describes this scene:
“There was a sudden bright explosion and corkscrew
trail across the sky; then darkness again and stars. There was a speck above
the island, a figure dropping swiftly beneath a parachute, a figure that hung
with dangling limbs. The changing winds of various altitudes took the figure
where they would. Then, three miles up, the wind steadied and bore it in a
descending curve round the sky and swept it in a great slant across the reef
and the lagoon toward the mountain.”
Here
there is more jargon and other official style tools rather than the plain style
that one would see on Sparknotes. It is in instances like these where younger
readers would be more inclined to view a summary to understand the picture that
Golding is trying to paint. This could arguably help students and readers have
an even better understanding of the language. If they are able to first
understand what is taking place in the story, then they can move past that part
and look at the complexities of the original language.
Another aspect seen in both the
actual work and Sparknotes’s interpretation of the story is that there are
quick sentence openings that make it easier for readers to follow along and not
get lost in a sentence before the actual meaning of the sentence becomes clear.
For example, in the chapter 4 summary, someone wrote:
“The littluns, who spend most of
their days eating fruit and playing with one another, are particularly troubled
by visions and bad dreams. They continue to talk about the “beastie” and fear
that a monster hunts in the darkness. The large amount of fruit that they eat
causes them to suffer from diarrhea and stomach ailments. Although the
littluns’ lives are largely separate from those of the older boys, there are a
few instances when the older boys torment the littluns. One vicious boy named
Roger joins another boy, Maurice, in cruelly stomping on a sand castle the
littluns have built. Roger even throws stones at one of the boys, although he
does remain careful enough to avoid actually hitting the boy with his stones.”
By
this point of the story, most people would know who most of the characters are
and the terms they are using to describe their surroundings. Despite this,
Sparknotes doesn’t use lengthy openings and descriptions to get the point
across. The reader can clearly picture what the school boys are going through
in this scene. What’s interesting is that Golding uses this technique in the
actual book as well. While some of the vocabulary may be slightly more
advanced, the sentences aren’t lengthy, and they get to the point right away so
the readers can avoid any confusion. For this example I can understand how the
Sparknotes might be more useful. Golding, in this chapter and a throughout
others, starts to use phrases and terms that were more popular in the 1950s
when the book was written, and this can clog up sentences and force readers to
look through that to get to the simple structure of the sentence. Yet I would
again argue that this makes the story much more exciting and engaging than
reading the simple sentences in an online summary.
Thirdly, both the summary and the
story make good use of active voice. Without it, the story and its characters
would become jumbled and very confusing to readers; especially readers who are
at an average middle school level. In the last chapter, the plot begins to
reach its climax, and the readers know what is happening because it is clearly
stated who is doing what action. In the opening someone writes:
“Ralph hides in the jungle and
thinks miserably about the chaos that has overrun the island. He thinks about
the deaths of Simon and Piggy and realizes that all vestiges of civilization
have been stripped from the island. He stumbles across the sow’s head, the Lord
of the Flies, now merely a gleaming white skull—as white as the conch shell, he
notes. Angry and disgusted, Ralph knocks the skull to the ground and takes the
stake it was impaled on to use as a weapon against Jack.”
Readers and students can clearly tell that Ralph is hiding or
that he’s thinking about the other school boys on the island with him. The
events of the book aren’t obscured by passive voice and lengthy descriptions.
Again this is still similar to how Golding writes Lord of the Flies. From this
same part you can clearly tell the actions of Ralph even through a more
literary lens, and again the average grade level and readability are close in
number.
While I
focused on just this one story, there are plenty of others as well as poems and
short stories, that have a greater justification of being summarized on a
website like Sparknotes. This could potentially be entirely situational. I
think that a story like this, where the author already uses a lot of plain
style, doesn’t need to be summarized in an even simpler way. It takes away from
actually learning about the book, the story behind it, even its historical
significance. However I do feel that some younger audiences could really
benefit from Sparknotes or other summarization sites. This is also situational.
Students younger than middle school age would most likely not be reading a book
with darker themes in it like this one. So if most excerpts were at or just
slightly above a middle school level, then why not be challenged a little and
read the story. It allows students to come up with their own questions and
interpretations of texts, and makes for a much more fascinating read.
-Carly Radiske
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