The English Major's Cheat Sheet Series
A few years back I got frustrated at the lack of any decent introductory or reference materials for English majors. I was looking for works that weren't pitched for graduate students or high-schoolers, and could be a one-stop shop for English majors throughout their undergraduate careers.
Well, things like that don't really exist. So I decided to make my own, by stealing lots of good stuff from hundreds of people and rolling it all together into The English Major's Cheat Sheet Series.
You can access pdf versions of everything in the series here. Almost all of them are in 6" x 9" format, which makes them smaller than a typical sheet of paper, but too big to fit into your pocket. If you'd rather have them in a landscape format that folds into a 4.75" x 7" booklet (a legal page in landscape mode, folded in half), you'll have to contact me directly for that.
And yes, I know that we're not supposed to encourage cheating, that the institution is (*cough* *cough*) concerned about academic integrity. With that in mind, every Cheat Sheet has an extensive "Stolen From" section that lists all the sources that I lifted material from. While I have foregone in-text citations for the sake of clarity, you can track down all the material contained in each Cheat Sheet. And if you can't find a source for something, it's probably something I wrote myself.
Background Information
These first two cover the most significant things you can read to enhance your understanding of literature in general: classical mythology and the Bible.
Reference
These can be used as reference guides for your day-to-day goings-on as an English major.
Formatting
This one distills the Modern Language Association Handbook, 9th edition. It's essential when you're working on a paper.
Comics and Graphic Novels
This is the only one in the series pitched for a wider audience. If you're an English major, you should be comfortable with analyzing a text. But when you add images, and have to address the interplay between texts and images, it's a whole new ballgame. So this Cheat Sheet walks you though the idea of visual rhetoric, in the hopes that you can improve your visual literacy.