When I’m teaching or mentoring prospective indexers, I focus primarily on term selection. Term selection involves the uniquely important indexing task of making decisions about what actually goes in the index. Unlike a search engine, we indexers don’t just put every mention of every term in the index. Being able to discern what is important, […]
Numbers in Indexes
The most memorable characteristic of an index is the arrangement of the entries in alphabetical order*. It makes it easy to find what you’re looking for, and even the picky differences between word-by-word and letter-by-letter arrangement aren’t noticeable to a casual user. But what about numbers? Since they’re not letters and therefore not obviously subject […]
