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Subject:Re: Indexing verbs? From:Janice Gelb <janiceg -at- marvin -dot- eng -dot- sun -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 20 Dec 2000 09:05:08 -0800 (PST)
In article ORG -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com, Christine -dot- Anameier -at- seagate -dot- com writes:
>
>Changing
> Item's Class
> Owner Security
> Report's Schedule
>
>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." (Even worse are the cases where a lazy writer has let
>the auto-index feature do the work, and the index consists entirely of
>entries like "Changing a Report's Schedule" and "Adding Employee
>Information" and my all-time favorite, "A word about the reports." But
>that's another issue.)
>
>Before I start chopping, can anyone offer a compelling reason to leave
>those entries intact? Or are they just clutter?
>
First of all, it's a fatal error on the part of an indexer
to assume that readers are going to look things up the way
*you* would look them up. You want to provide as many alternate
ways of looking up a concept as are reasonable, using xrefs if
you don't want to duplicate short entries.
As for including verbs, often different products use different
names for roughly the same thing (e.g., what's called a "report"
in your product may be called a "summary" in someone else's),
so readers could easily prefer to look up the verb and then see
what noun in the subentries matches their mental concept. Also,
some people think in actions rather than nouns: if what they
want to do is change something, they're going to look under
"changing."
Certainly the automatic indexing of heads when they make no
sense in an index should be deleted!
***********************************************************************
Janice Gelb | The only connection Sun has with
janice -dot- gelb -at- marvin -dot- eng -dot- sun -dot- com | this message is the return address. http://www.geocities.com/Area51/8018/index.html
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