Texts can be structured in lots of ways: chapter titles formed into tables of contents, section headings and subheadings, numbered sections or paragraphs. How do indexers use these in their work?
Sue Penny, Advanced Professional Member
I quite like printing off the contents page so I can tick off each chapter as I finish it, but other than that, ‘it depends.’ Sometimes section headings can be a great help, but I’m surprised at how often the heading really doesn’t have much in common with the text content.
The academic texts I index almost always give a chapter by chapter precis in the introduction, and this is gold dust – especially in multi-authored works, because it helps you to decide on preferred terms.
Rohan Bolton, Fellow
In my early indexing days I did not make much use of these but over time I have found I use them more and more. I print out the contents list when I receive the text and, before starting to index each chapter, I make notes on the section headings to give me an idea of the content and structure.
Helen Bilton, Advanced Professional Member
A bit. Most in my fields don’t include sub-headings/section headings anyway, just chapter titles with beginning pages only. Gives me a rough idea of length and overall topic content but not much more. I always create my own map of the document in Word which includes start and, crucially, end page numbers for chapter headings and sub-headings. By the time I’ve done that I have a much better overview of the book, its topics and what is coming up.
Rob Gibson, Advanced Professional Member
For me, very useful. The table of contents normally gives a good initial overview of the main subject areas covered by the book, and hence the index entries that are going to be the most detailed. Within the text, section headings that speak literally to the content of what follows may make the best index entries also.
Christine Boylan, Advanced Professional Member
I briefly glance at the contents. Chapter heading can be very misleading as to content and I find that authors tend to drift off topic particularly in multi-authored edited books. Section headings are often useful – medical and science books are often arranged with much of the information partitioned in this way and this helps with the index entries.
Jan Worrall, Fellow
They help me get an overview of the what the text is about, what the underlying themes and topics are, before staring work on the indexing, so that I have a feel for what sort of entries I need to be creating.
Helen Taylor, Advanced Professional Member
These are often very useful. The table of contents gives a useful summary of the structure of the book. I tend to write the chapter section headings out before I start work on a chapter which gives me an idea of the structure and themes of the chapter and how long each section is. With some books I find the section headings very useful and I can use them as subheadings, possibly rewording them slightly or grouping some together if they are very short sections.
Nic Nicholas, Fellow
I certainly find section headings useful when indexing academic books – students need to get to a particular topic quickly. I may have two or three entries for a section heading for easy access. I look at the contents page when editing to double-check whether or not they would be any use to readers.
This post is part of our Ask the Indexers series. The previous post asked about the use of reference sources
