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Christine Anameier regularly encounters indexes <<... where the writer has
included generic verbs as keywords. For example: Changing... If I'm using
this index and I want to know how to change a report's schedule, I'm going
to look under "report" or "schedule"... but definitely not under
"changing.">>
Whereas I'm more likely to look under changing, which only goes to show that
different people use indexes differently. The key is to recognize this fact
and provide at least two points of access: one under the action, with
subentries for each noun that action affects, and another under the nouns,
with the list of verbs that apply to that noun. And just like with nouns,
verbs should also have synonyms: modifying, editing, revising, etc. for
changing.
<<Even worse are the cases where a lazy writer has let the auto-index
feature do the work>>
Yup. The purpose of an index is to translate the words as they appear in the
text into the words as they appear in the user's head. Autoindexing
(building a concordance) doesn't do that, and produces inferior indexes.
"Technical writing... requires understanding the audience, understanding
what activities the user wants to accomplish, and translating the often
idiosyncratic and unplanned design into something that appears to make
sense."--Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer
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