Indexing

Gets to the heart of what good writing is all about

Indexes have been called "the map to a book." While a table of contents provides a brief overview of the contents of a text, the index reveals the subject matter in detail. Without the index, access to information is severely compromised. However well-written a book is, if readers are unable to navigate their way around the text, the good work of the author can be undone.

Located at the back of a book, an index groups together information that is scattered throughout the document. With the aim of providing quick and easy access, an index helps the reader retrieve names, concepts, terms and ideas efficiently by pointing to locations in the text where those discussions exist.

The usability of a book is increased by the inclusion of an index, for the index aids the reader who wants to find a favorite passage, or the student who needs to find information in a textbook. An index also saves research time, as references to the same topic are grouped together so that readers don't have to peruse the whole text to find what they are looking for.

Although indexes follow certain structures and guidelines, they are adaptable. An index can be created to serve different audiences -- laymen, professionals, academics, students, and children. Thus, an index may offer different levels of structure depending on the needs of the target readers.

An index will not only employ terminology supplied by the author, it will anticipate that the reader may look for concepts using different phrasing. The index will list items using vocabulary the reader might search for and it will also redirect the reader to terms preferred by the author through cross-references (see and see also), thereby accurately representing the author's perspective.

The value of an Index

Studies have shown that books that include indexes have greater overall appeal than those volumes on the same subject without one. With many books on the same subject, there are greater chances that the book with an index will be selected by book-store buyers, educators, and Amazon.com customers. The absence of an index may end up hurting a book's potential popularity. Librarians -- especially University Librarians -- are deterred from adding books without indexes to their library's collection. Additionally, an index is helpful to authors looking to get their books assessed; a book critic will usually look to its index before deciding to review it.

An Index by any other name

Because there are software programs that can generate "automatic indexes" readers may be mistakenly led to believe that a computer application can produce a quality index. However, the very best that a software program can actually do is generate a concordance, which is an unstructured, alphabetical list of key words or phrases and the page numbers on which they appear. Such a computer produced, automatic index, does not organize the ideas and information in a text.

A true index -- being more than an elaborate version of the table of contents -- reveals the relationships among concepts in a book and contains all the important topics, subtopics and cross references in a meaningful, not just alphabetical, order.

Additionally, the human indexer will evaluate a text in a way a software program cannot and discriminate between extensive coverage versus just passing mention of a topic. A reputable book deserves a true hand-crafted index -- such as the kind produced by inDocs inDexing Services.