"In grammar school they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fairy tale. In the university they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fact!" -Ron Carlson
My mom picked up a nice little helpful book on Hamlet today for me (thank you!) and I quite like it. The series is called SparkNotes, and I guess it's essentially the same thing as Cliffs Notes. It's nice to have it explained in plain English. Anyway, I noticed on the back of the book the website for SparkNotes, and it mentioned message boards so I thought it would be kinda fun to check those out and see if there was any information on some events in the play that the book didn't address directly. What I found was pretty sad though. The boards are big, and pretty active, but most of the posts are people asking questions that look like they come straight out of their assignments and they didn't even think about them. For example this question preceding a list of quotes:
i need to know who is the speaker, the context the passage occurs in. also the dramatic purpose, or dramatic significance (basically expalin how the passage my reveal character, advance the plot, illustrate the theme) on the following quotes:
That sounds very similar to the assignment I'm currently working on. Essentially this person is asking someone else to do their homework for them. They're so lazy they didn't even bother to capitalize or check spelling, or even try to disguise the fact that they're taking their question right out of the assignment, most likely. The quotes they're asking help on are also some of the easiest in the play:
"Thus conscience does make cowards of us all!"
"my words fly up, my thoughts remain below: words without thoughts never to heaven go."
Come on, how hard are those? *sigh* And what's worse is a lot of these people are getting answers. Not this particular person, at least not yet, but it's just so disappointing. I love the Internet, but I hate to see it abused this way.
