Indexing Insights

The indexer has definitely identified the metatopic here. The next step is to break it down into useful chunks for the reader, identifying the topics and sorting them sensibly and helpfully. Indexing. Biographies (which this seems to be) have a common pattern, which is helpful: parents, birth, childhood, education, work, publications, controversies, rivals, schools of thought, and so on.

A few lines below, under Tonquédec, is an example of an undifferentiated locator. Imagine the reader paging through each of these locators, searching for some content. Also, having  so many one-page locators gives the impression of a concordance or a search operation done in Word; no help to anyone.

A lesson here is to see yourself as the reader’s advocate. A reader who wants to use up chicken, or who wants to make enchiladas specifically, will start out searching under C or E, not S for “Simple.” Similarly, the “Saucy” meatballs and pork a few lines above. Even the whole R section seems unhelpful. A solution would be to have two indexes: one by title, and one by main ingredient: beans, chicken, hash, and so on.

What we’re looking at here is a series of undifferentiated locators. They would be “differentiated” (although we don’t use that term) if they were sorted in helpful categories such that the reader could “locate” the topics they were interested in. You can see the topic “Health,” but there are many such pages and the topic isn’t broken down into smaller topics. Common practice is to stop at seven, then find a commonality into which to break the topic.

Indexing is often seen as a slog for authors (who shouldn’t be writing them themselves, but that’s another story!) On hearing that there are people dedicated to this craft, people usually still think it’s a chore, or can “be done by a machine these days.”

This little figure shows the characteristics that many of us [humans] share.

This is one of oh so many such comments out there. And as with so much customer feedback, how many others are thinking this, but haven’t spoken up?

And again.