Shvoong.com Is a Great Web Site and Resource for Readers and Freelance Writers

Shvoong.com is a terrific resource for students, researchers, or anyone else interested in quick capsule summaries of books, web sites, journals, magazines, movies and newspapers. Advertising themselves as the place for abstracts, they are probably one of the most honest research-oriented web sites around. You'll find no promises of fully detailed analysis of these works, just summaries.

Shvoong.com allows freelance writers to submit a summary of at least 300 words and no more than 900 words. Obviously, you can't expect a lot of detail of Tolstoy's mammoth novel War & Peace, or practically any Stephen King book when in that allotted amount of words. Although anyone can write a summary, that doesn't necessarily mean there's a guaranteed lack of quality. For one thing, each summary is checked for accuracy and to guard against plagiarism. And for another, each abstract can be rated by readers. If several summaries of the same material are submitted, the ones that consistently get bad ratings will be removed.

The abstracts are initially divided into five categories: Books, Humanities, Science, WWW, and Newspapers. To further assist you, these five categories are then broken down into subcategories. For instance, under books you can narrow your search down into genres such as horror, classics, plays, fairy tales, Greek Tragedy, and many more. The Science subcategories include biology, chemistry, physics, statistics, etc. Humanities include such topics as film studies, Jewish studies, linguistics, law, musicology, etc. The WWW section subcategories are more general in nature: blogs, auction sites, search engine, SEO, software, etc. The Newspaper section is broken down by country.