There is little wasted verbiage or space. BarCharts' American History 1 covers the Civil War in 560 words. Competitor Papertech Marketing Group Inc. of Concord, Ontario, is even more succinct, crunching the Civil War into 127 words. The charts have their fans. Smith has taken dozens of classes over the past decade at three schools and owns more than 30 BarCharts, from accounting to psychology.
Academics have long maligned study aids for dumbing down information.
The CliffsNotes series, the yellow and black stapled booklets that have helped students understand Shakespeare and other literary greats since 1958, raises the hackles of English instructors for encouraging students to skip reading the source material. Villanova University in the Philadelphia area banned CliffsNotes from its bookstore in 1997. They are less hated. She began recommending the BarCharts microeconomics guide to students last winter. One critic, Matthieu Deflem, says students would learn more if they did their own summaries.