Thanks for the critique, MsWhatsit. There are a few of those where the way I did it does make sense (not worth sidetracking any farther to explain), but you brought up some excellent points overall. A few of them made me cringe (oops!).
If you think that’s “slightly unprofessional,” you should have seen some of the actual content in the manual – I’ve always believed that there’s a place for humor in technical books, as it keeps readers engaged.
I think my favorite index of all time was in a Gary Larson Far Side book. There were headings for -A-, -B-, -C-, and so forth with nothing at all under them. Then, under -T-, it said something like this:
The one about the albatross, 18
The one about the caveman, 29
The one about the dinosaur, 9
The one about the eggplant, 71
It included every single cartoon in the index under “T”, and then continued with empty headings for V-Z.
Sorry for reserecting an old thread, but I meant to post this at the time and never got around to it.
One thing that really irks me with some indexes is when they list every single mention of a topic without some how indicating which pages are covering the main discussion of the topic. Thus, any passing reference in the text has the same emphasis as the section devoted to the subject in question. Sometimes you can deduce the main topic area by the number of pages, but not always. This is particularly a problem in reference type books and study guides that contain succinct summaries of a lot of topics, and a typical topic sumary may have only one or two pages anyway. So you end up flipping back to the index multiple times until you find the main area. That, when the whole point of a review book is to be a quick reference. It drives me bananas.
At the risk of offending any European indexers out there, I have found this annoying indexing style to be much more common in books out of Europe, particularly Great Britain.
It’s really great when the main topic area is bolded or italicized or something. Is this a issue discussed among indexers?
Sometimes you’ll get a publisher that requests main topic mentions to get special formatting (i.e. boldface or italics) but this is very unusual these days. Usually you can make clear which is the main topic discussion either by the fact that it has the longest page range or by doing this:
In that case, it’s pretty clear that 4-5 is your main discussion of birds, because it is the only page range listed after the main entry. Everything else is in a subentry. But sometimes you don’t have space to do a bunch of subentries, so the publisher will just run everything back into the main head:
Birds, 4-5, 6, 19
And then the reader is left to try to deduce which of those is the main entry. Particularly annoying if, as you say, there are several two-page ranges or whatever. (Birds, 4-5, 6-8, 19-20)
So to sum up, it is a known problem, and it is not always one that you can solve satisfactorily, unfortunately. Although generally I try to make as clear as possible which of the page ranges is the main entry.
Also, by the way, passing references generally do not need to be indexed, and if you have an index that covers every single mention of a word in the text, even if there is no significant discussion of the topic on that page, I’d consider that an error in indexing. (There are exceptions to this, notably in the case of proper names, but as a general thing you don’t index passing references.)
Since the thread was reopened and the OP is posting in it, here goes:
Are there any non-native English speakers who index English works? How important is raw language ability in indexing? I’d think indexing “Introduction to American History” for 4th graders would be fairly easy for someone who wasn’t the best at English. Complex dissertations on obscure Medieval British literature, not so much.
Just bumping to add a couple notes about indexing e-books, specifically Kindle versions.
Dana Jacobi’s Cook & Freeze is very well-done. The Table of Contents has each chapter title as a hyperlink to the chapter start, and the index retains the page numbers but hyperlinks them to the items in question. This is done on page numbers throughout the text as well.
In contrast, there’s the Kindle version of Rick Bayless’ Authentic Mexican. I used the Amazon iPhone app to scan the hardcover’s barcode at the hospital bookstore this morning (doing some shopping before work) to double-check the reviews and wanted to see what was with the 3 reviews of 1- or 2-stars. Turns out they were for the Kindle version only. No internal links to the “and use this sauce” types of recipes, the index just had the print version page numbers and no links, and one reviewer reported often not being able to find recipes by typing in words from the recipe title (which makes me think the recipe names weren’t made searchable?). One of those reviewers gives high praise to Bittman’s How to Cook Everything e-book for indexing and internal references.
I’m just dropping in to extend a note of appreciation to MsWhatsit, whose indexing posts on G+ I’ve also always found worth reading. I learned very early on in my collegiate career the frustrations of a poorly indexed book and I have much appreciation for those who do good indices. (There’s one textbook that was required for 2 classes and i used as a reference text for probably 3 or 4 more that was just horrible. Page numbers were off by 2 or 3 pages, obvious important information had no entries. For some subjects, there was no option other than starting at the first likely sounding chapter and reading straight through until you found the right info.)
Well, language ability is fairly important, yeah. I am not personally familiar with anyone who indexes in a non-native language, but certainly if Nabokov could write entire novels in a second language, I’m sure that someone could learn English sufficiently well to be able to index a book. But you’d have to have some degree of fluency, of course.
Thanks! Do you mind if I share the content of your post on my indexing listserv? It’s germane to some ebook conversations that have been going on there lately.
The fact that the page numbers were off makes me think that they just used an index from a previous edition of the book without editing it. It has been really astonishing to me, throughout my career, how very little knowledge about indexing some publishing professionals seem to have. I’ll put it this way: After reading Indexing Books by Nancy Mulvaney, which is the gold standard for indexing texts, I knew about five times more on the topic of indexing than any other single person in the small publishing house I then worked for. I constantly run into publishers that don’t have any idea what I’m asking them when I ask if they want a run-in or indented index, or whether they want notes indexed, etc. I’m like… you guys have published books before, and those books had indexes, right? Why is this new information for you?!
To be fair, some publishers and authors are very knowledgeable indeed, and know exactly what to look for in an index. But the other type is surprisingly common.
(Also, thanks for the words of appreciation! I am continually surprised when anyone other than me finds this stuff interesting.)
– I’ve always believed that there’s a place for humor in technical books, as it keeps readers engaged.