Conference Review: Berlin 2022
Review of the Continental Connections international indexing conference held in Berlin, Germany, in October 2022, from the perspective of one there in person.
Review of the Continental Connections international indexing conference held in Berlin, Germany, in October 2022, from the perspective of one there in person.
3 April 2024 For the past month+, I’ve had limited use of my right (dominant) arm. This has led to my purchase of a programmable mouse. In truth, it’s a gaming mouse, but I have repurposed it for productivity. When I first got it, I… Read More »Of Mice and Indexers
19 March 2024 Every so often, a new indexer (or editor, or proofreader) asks whether they need to have a contract with their clients. I always answer yes. One of two questions follow: Why aren’t the email exchanges enough? What should go in the contract?… Read More »Business Contracts, or Why Email Isn’t Enough
Cross-references are, in the end, a balancing act. Too many and the reader is caught in a sticky spider’s web, unable to move forward due to the plethora of options without clear guidance. Too few, and the reader is attempting to climb a cargo net at summer camp, feet constantly slipping through holes while they struggle to find their way in an index that doesn’t provide enough guidance.
27 February 2024 Indexing textbooks for funerary professionals comes with its own peculiar set of challenges (especially when dealing with the before photos), but it’s helpful when the authors have a sense of humour. To wit, Supercilium (eyebrows). As mentioned, cilia means “lashes” or “eyebrows,”… Read More »The Importance of a Sense of Humour
20 February 2024 I am not one to traditionally wax poetic about war (especially right now). Even less likely am I to get dewy eyed at the mere description of battleships. And yet here I sit, indexing a military history book, and finding myself needing… Read More »Indexing Reflections: Battleship Names
13 February 2024 Or makes it better, I suppose. Depends on how you look at it. All I can say is that Hamilton makes it very hard not to break out in song when indexing a book on the American Revolution. With every mention of… Read More »Pop Culture Ruins Indexing
So it turns out, doing your due diligence to find out if your spouse was dead in the seventeenth century, thus permitting you to remarry within the Church, required a trip to Veracruz. Of course, this assumes you’re already in the Caribbean. Pretty sure if… Read More »TIL: Due Diligence
Finally, you can see the finish line. You’ve spent months if not years writing your book, sent it through multiple rounds of editing, from the developmental to copyediting, and now it’s in the final stage of proofreading before being sent to the printer. All that’s left is to review the proofs and append that index. No sweat. You know what you wrote, how hard can it be to run a quick search in Word for the key ideas and alphabetize them? Heck, even a grad student can do it!
You could do that, but both you and your publisher are likely to be unhappy with the end result.