links for students
Here's a helpful essay by Tim Burke, a historian at Swarthmore College, on "How to Read in College."
People take notes in a wide variety of ways, but one of the most useful ways is called the Cornell Note-Taking System. Check it out.
For people learning to make strong arguments, one of the most useful schemes for understanding how arguments work was developed by a philosopher named Stephen Toulmin. Overviews of "Toulmin arguments" may be found here, here, and here.
You can find a detailed and systematic guide to MLA formatting here.
There are some helpful links concerning citations and formatting at the Wheaton College Writing Center webpage.
BibMe is an online bibliography tool, apparently started as a project by some computer science students at Carnegie-Mellon. You enter the title or author of a book, and BibMe searches Amazon and other sites to retrieve its bibliographical information (publisher, date, etc.). You follow a similar process for journal articles and other resources. You can make multiple bibliographies, for instance, one for each research paper you write. Once you’ve gathered all the sources for a given project, you can download the information as an RTF file in the appropriate citation method (MLA, APA, Chicago). Pretty cool, huh? — especially for those of you who just can’t remember how to cite sources accurately. (There are other sites that do the same thing — RapidCite, for instance — but BibMe is the one I've tested and found accurate.)
In commenting on your papers I often use standard proofreading symbols: here's a good list of them.
A useful glossary of literary terms may be found here, and another, less comprehensive but still reliable, here. Far more detailed definitions, though of varying quality, may be found on Wikipedia, of course; a complete list of them is here.
W. W. Norton has provided some helpful timelines of world literature, to get you oriented chronologically. They have some pretty cool maps too.
Norton also provides a lot of information about English literature and its historical contexts on their Norton Anthology of English Literature site.
Here's a wonderful interactive timeline of British history from the BBC.
The two most comprehensive collections of scholarly journals are Project Muse and JSTOR. If you are using a computer on the Wheaton College campus, you will have automatic full-text access to these — but if you're off-campus you'll need to use the "off-campus login" option at the top of the home page for Buswell Library.
The same is true with that most magisterial of all reference books, the Oxford English Dictionary.
Another especially useful reference for students of the humanities — now, I'm pleased to say, available on the Web — is the Dictionary of the History of Ideas.
Once again you'll need to be on campus or proxy-enabled to use it, but the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism is an exemplary encyclopedia, immense, wide-ranging, and detailed. A similarly outstanding resource in the realm of philosophy per se is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Two useful portals that lead you to a wide range of scholarly work, especially in literary and cultural theory, are The English Server and The Voice of the Shuttle.
For students of modern British literature, the Norton Anthology of English Literature website has some very helpful information and links to other sources.
Also for my Modern British students, I maintain some links to interesting and helpful sites on my del.icio.us pages.