(no subject)

[rhu]

Dan Bricklin posts in his blog about the difficulties inherent in proofreading an index.

I must admit that I'm surprised that the technology is such that he actually has to proofread the index by, well, proofreading the index. Wouldn't it make more sense to check the indexing by using a proof copy of the body text with the index entries as marginalia?

Comments

[cellio]

You need to do both (and the tools I use can support the margin-note approach, though I usually just read the source). What you're talking about catches the "is this a good entry for this paragraph?", but you also need to read the index itself for the overall picture -- were you consistent in terminology, level of depth, degree of coverage, etc? Sometimes it's only when I'm looking at the index that I realize I've used two different verbs to decribe the same concept, so half my entries are under one and half under the other. (This can be mitigated by a house style, which I started to build after the first time I discovered that sort of problem.)