Procrastindexing
Wednesday, 17 May, 2006
I've been psyching myself up for DBK III all morning by putting together everything into one Word file and looking up stuff on the internet about how to index. I've only ever done it once and it turned out pretty average—more like DBK II than I (quite a significant difference there!)
I found this site which is basically an FAQ written by people from the American Society of Indexers. It's sprinkled with some rather interesting quotes. I think this one will have to go on my office wall:
When I tell people that I am working on an index to a book, they tend to hang their heads in sorrow. I tell them that compiling an index for a book is a lot more fun than writing a book could ever be, a relaxing jaunt from A to Z compared with a jerky stop-start trek without maps.
Craig Brown, Times Saturday Review, 21 July 1990
I thought being a writer was isolating but apparently being an indexer is worse:
Indexers are in effect trying to provide answers to a host of unasked questions. Indexers therefore need to work as if their audience is present. But there are two snags: first, in most cases they do not know who this audience will be; second, in most cases they do not receive any feedback as to whether their judgments have been successful. From a communicative point of view, there is probably no more isolated intellectual task than indexing. The twilight howl of the indexer might well be Is there anybody there?
David Crystal, editorial, The Indexer, April 1995
And will I ever be like this person?:
Whoever the indexer is, he or she should be intelligent, widely read, and well acquainted with publishing practices also levelheaded, patient, scrupulous in handling detail, and analytically minded. This rare bird must while being intelligent, levelheaded, patient, accurate, and analytical work at top speed to meet an almost impossible deadline.
Chicago Manual of Style, 13th ed.
Blinks:
A way of funding writing in the future: pitch and idea and get people to support it.
Place where you can hire play equipment for parties, etc.
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
|
|
Disqus comments
Other comments
An indexer is like a librarian…except much more odd and batty. In Oz, they mostly live in the Blue Mountains, in my experience. There’s software too - Cindex, I think it’s called - but I really didn’t pay much attention in my editing classes on this topic.
What an awesome job!!!
I frequently experience frustration when searching through a poorly assembled index that doesn’t seem to answer any of my unasked questions. So i reckon it’d be great to be able to do it yourself!
But I definitely think you’ll be great at it Karen! You certainly seem widely read, but I think your greatest advantage is that you read what’s on the page and pay attention at the same time.
Whoever authored the Chicago Manual of Style needs to reacquaint themselves with proper grammar and punctuation.
Railways’s! Railways’s!
Oh, wait. That was MLA. Thesis flashbacks.
Please, continue.
You can’t diss Chicago! It contains the rules of American language!
But isn’t Chicago missing a semicolon (or similar) and at least three commas?
(I should confess here that my sense of grammar and punctuation is based almost entirely on strength-of-feeling; I put a comma or semicolon or whatever in when it feels right.)