Lesson 6: Indexing Your Documents
Build in redundancy
Once you've chosen the topics and terms to index, you might think you're almost done with your index. You would be wrong. Not every reader thinks the same way and simply including a single entry for an importance concept isn't enough. If there are alternate terms use them.
For instance, in our Visual Basic chapter above, include the common abbreviation for Visual Basic - VB - in the index. Think of alternate terminology people might use when saying "developing clients" and provide index entries for them. Do the same for other words and phrases. If you don't use that terminology at all within the book, use a "see" reference to indicate that it's covered under another name.
We came up with five base index entries for the Visual Basic chapter above. Adding in redundant and alternate entries, we might get the following entries:
- Building Visual Basic Clients
- Clients, Visual Basic
- Clients, Visual Basic, Available Objects
- Clients, Visual Basic, Debugging
- Clients, Visual Basic, Error Handling
- Debugging, Visual Basic
- Developing Visual Basic Clients
- Error Handling, Visual Basic
- Exceptions: see Error Handling
- Objects, Visual Basic
- Throwing Exceptions: see Error Handling
- VB Clients: see Visual Basic Clients
- Visual Basic, Available Objects
- Visual Basic, Debugging
- Visual Basic, Error Handling
- Visual Basic Clients
As you can see, this gives the user many more ways to find that same information they need.
