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Does Your Book Need An Index?
An index is a list of words or phrases and associated pointers to where useful material relating to that heading can be found in a document.
Does your need an index? Yes, all non-fiction books need an index! An index improves the written work, and saves the reader time and energy in their search for relevant information. It provides a gateway to the author's ideas: it's the map to the book. An index enhances the sales of your book.
An index is not a concordance. A well thought out index will anticipate how a reader will search for information, will use cross references, and alternate terms to lead users to information in the book.
The indexer can start working on the index only after the pagination of the book is complete. The indexer must read through the entire text, analyse it, separate the trivial from the substantive, and identify the underlying structure of ideas that run through the book. The index then has to be proofread and checked for visual effectiveness and use of ease. And often, the indexer has no more than a week or two to compile and submit the index.
I hope you find this information useful! Thank you!
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Steve Novak on
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Excellent ! What a nice, concise explanation. I had to look up concordance, though...
Does it help to see a manuscript before the final layout and pagination, to get an idea of the book? Or would that just mean reading it twice because you need the pages to do the index?
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Permalink Reply by Sudha Menon on
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Thank you, Steve!
It did cross my mind that the word 'concordance' might need explaining...sorry :)
It is not really necessary to see the manuscript before pagination and final completion. Yes, we do need to go through the book twice, but the first is just a cursory examination to provide an overall, general idea of the text and to enable an assessment of the degree of exhaustivity of the index and should take just a few hours.
It is then read again more carefully, analyzing text and selecting index terms, etc. That should take a week or two depending on the complexity of text.
Finally, one needs a day or two to edit the index.
:) Sudha
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Permalink Reply by Brad Poulson on
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Wikipedia reference for “concordance”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordance
Also, I'm linking this discuss to SPAN's PIP Best Practices Discussion on Editing: http://www.spannet.org/group/writingediting/forum/topics/editing-be...
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