Re: Indexing

[Robert Plamondon <robert -at- PLAMONDON -dot- COM>]

Most programs only seem capable of creating a concordance, not an index.
My experience is that almost every topic should end up in the index
in three places (two obvious, and one dependent on the structure of
the book).  For example, the section "What Wombats do During the Day"
might be indexed as: "Wombats, daytime behavior," "Daytime behavior,
wombats," "Diurnal: see daytime," "Marsupials, wombats: see wombats."
(This one ended up with four because I figured that some fancy-pants
readers might try to look the topic up under "diurnal.")

This simple example has only a two-level index.  Many works ought to
have a three-level index.

Of course, if you just tell your word processor to index every occurrance
of the word "wombat," all you get is a single-level index that isn't
an index at all -- it's a concordance.  Concordances are word lists;
indexes are hierarchical structures based on the relationships of ideas
to one another.  Indexes are useful and professional; concordances are
clumsy and amateurish.

Concordances also miss a lot.  A paragraph talking about ground-dwelling
marsupials in general ought to be indexed under "wombat" even if the
word "wombat" is not used.  This sort of occurrance is very common.
At the other extreme, a book that uses the word "wombat" in the text
a couple of hundred times is going to make life very difficult for
the reader of a concordance, when just wants to find, "wombats, early
attempts at domestication," without going through all 200 concordance
entries in page order.

Of course, indexing is hard work, and an automatic concordance can be
slapped together in a few hours with the right software.

The CHICAGO MANUAL OF STYLE has an excellent section on indexing, which
I consider a "must-read" for anyone in the biz.

        -- Robert
--
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