Benefits of Using a Study Guide
What’s In a SuperSummary Study Guide?
Study Guide Uses for Students
How to Use a Study Guide as a Student
How to Make a Study Guide for a Test Using SuperSummary
Study Guide Uses for Teachers
How to Use a Study Guide as a Teacher
Study Guide Uses for Book Clubs
How to Use a Study Guide for Book Club
Using SuperSummary to Supplement Your Reading
As the name implies, study guides are a great tool for students—but they’re also invaluable teaching devices, book club refreshers, cheat sheets for parents and tutors supporting a student’s learning, and wit-sharpeners for casual readers.
SuperSummary creates literary study guides designed to help all of these audiences develop a deeper understanding of their favorite (or, let’s be honest, least favorite) texts and build invaluable study skills along the way. Even the trickiest assigned reading feels approachable with such a resource at your side. When used the right way, our guides can help you ace your next exam or essay, teach your class like a tenured professor, or lead book club conversations with a cool head.
You can use them however you please, but if you need a little direction, we’ve created this how-to to help you.
If you’re looking for measurable benefits, like better grades or hours saved, it’s true that study guides provide them. (In fact, 96% of students said our resources helped them get a higher grade, and 97% of teachers said these resources saved them time.)
But many of the benefits aren’t so quantifiable. They also:
Our guides are packed with comprehensive summary and rich analysis to help you make the most of any text, whether you’re a teacher, student, parent, book club member, or casual reader. They include:
Study guides are for studying, of course, but as a student, there are many different ways to make the most of these handy tools. You can use the it to:
It would be nice if you could just lay your study guide under your pillow and absorb all the information inside, but alas, making the most of a these resources does require a little more effort. Instead, we’d suggest the following:
While some might argue that study guides could replace reading the source text in a pinch, we wouldn’t suggest it. There are nuances, such as tone, dialogue, and syntax, that just can’t be captured outside of the original text. Instead, you should read the source carefully and use the other resources to supplement your reading.
Think of your study guide like a map. If you’re going for a hike, a map can be a really valuable tool for making the most of it. But without the hike itself, the map won’t deliver much of an experience. Similarly, the study guide can be your map when analyzing a text—but without reading the text itself, you won’t get as much from the additional resources.
As you get to the end of each section, it’s best practice to pause and digest the material you just covered. There are many tactics you can take to do so—such as writing a summary of the chapters or taking notes about the content as you read—but using a guide is particularly helpful.
With it, you’ll review the text’s important plot points and/or ideas, which helps them stick in your mind. And the guide will cover all of the notable symbols, themes, characters, and motifs within those chapters—many of which you might have missed. By identifying these important literary devices in the previous chapters, you’ll be able to note them in the following chapters, therefore building a more comprehensive perception of the work as a whole.
To avoid any spoilers, we wouldn’t suggest reading the guide in full before you finish the text (although some readers like to visit the Essay Topics section before reading in order to raise their awareness of key literary elements before reading).
Reading a study guide after you finish the text will help you build a birds-eye view of the text as a whole. You’ll develop a better understanding of characters’ roles within the larger narrative, the interplay of symbols, and the context behind the story’s motifs.
Reviewing it will also serve as a refresher on the content that might have already slipped your mind. The Important Quotes section, for example, will bring you back to key passages and remind you why they mattered.
The study guide is rife with inspiration. By marking key passages that caught your attention, you can revisit them and build your own ideas and arguments off of their foundation.
Some examples of passages you might want to mark include:
Whether you have a test tomorrow or an essay due next month, your study guide can help you prepare. Some strategies you could use include:
While our guides are top-notch, a popular—and effective—study tactic is to write your own study guide. This allows you to organize information in a way that makes the most sense to you, and the act of writing itself is a helpful exercise.
To make your own study guide using SuperSummary, you should:
Our content a great resource for teachers as you prepare for class, creating and grading assignments, and testing. Many of our guides, like this one for Romeo & Juliet, even include auxiliary teaching materials.
Study guides can be used as supplemental teacher materials or as a primary basis for literature study in order to help teachers:
As you prepare your lesson plan for a literary work, it can be helpful to have a structured template for understanding all of the material. Enter: the study guide. Here’s how we’d suggest making the most of it in the classroom.
You probably already know that there’s no substitute for reading the text itself. There are details—including important literary devices you’ll want to share with your students—that you’ll completely miss if you don’t read the text. That said, if you’re planning a lesson on a text you teach year after year, the guide can serve as a helpful refresher between readings. But we still wouldn’t recommend going more than one school year without reading the text (again, the details matter!).
As a teacher, you probably know how helpful it is to pause at certain points while reading to review the material you just covered. Using a study guide can make these check-ins even more valuable.
As you wrap up reading each section, switch gears and review the corresponding chapter summary and analysis. Doing so will highlight important plot points or ideas from the section that you need to remember. Plus, reviewing the important themes and symbols mid-read will help you identify them as they appear in the rest of the text, meaning you’ll develop a richer understanding of the work as a whole.
As you read the text, inspiration will strike. Be sure to keep a pen and paper or note-taking app at the ready so you can jot down discussion points or test questions you could ask your students, as well as any other ideas you might have.
Once you finish the text, turn your attention to the study guide. By reading the book, you’ve already established a foundational understanding of it—the plot, characters, and even some symbols and themes. But reading the study guide takes that basic understanding and makes it richly multidimensional.
Each section of the resource will serve its own purpose in deepening your understanding of the text:
As you read it, highlight the ideas and arguments that feel most significant or relevant to you, especially anything that might connect to other texts on the syllabus.
Leading discussion is both one of the most productive and one of the most difficult teaching methods. Talking about the text helps students develop their understanding of it, as well as their critical thinking and debate skills. But actually getting them to start talking can be a challenge.
When you bring your guide into the classroom, you have a whole list of curated essay topics you can use to launch conversations. The other sections can be helpful too:
When it comes time to craft your exam or grade an essay, it can feel difficult to think of new ideas or even remember the details of the text. It can even act as a rubric.
Use it to:
Just because it’s called a “study guide” doesn’t mean it’s only useful in the classroom. These are great tools for casual readers and book club members, too, prompting analytical and critical thinking about a text that makes you a stronger reader (and thinker).
When preparing for book club, use this resource to:
If you’re a member of a book club (or even if you’re just reading a text for fun), using a guide can deepen your understanding of the text and give you the tools to share your ideas with others.
To prepare for book club, we’d suggest:
The hardest part of book club is also the reason for book club. But you can’t really understand, or engage in conversation about, the work without reading it.
You won’t want to read the guide in full before you’ve finished the book (no spoilers, please!), but you could supplement your reading with the chapter summaries and analysis. The chapter summaries are broken into sensical chunks. As you get to the end of each section or chapter, read the corresponding chapter summary and analysis.
Doing so will highlight key plot points and deepen your understanding of what you’ve read by pointing out important themes and symbols. You can then apply this newfound knowledge to the rest of your reading.
Now you can read the full guide. By doing so, you’ll develop an even deeper understanding of the work, its literary devices, and the author’s intentions. As you read it, be sure to mark any passages or ideas that stick out to you. These can serve as great fodder for conversation during book club.
Your guide is your cheat sheet for a successful book club. Here’s how you can use it:
Sure, they’re helpful in the moment, but our large library of guides can also help you pick your next read. Check out our Collections to find other works like your last read or something totally different. If you find a work you’re interested in, you know there will be a corresponding guide to help you make the most of it.
Our collections include:
No matter your role, SuperSummary can be your go-to resource for better understanding the texts you read. In addition to our expansive library of expert-written study guides, we also provide a large library of learning content to supplement every reader's experience.
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