Wordwallah

 

Quick tips

Not sure about how to use Track Changes in Word? Click here for a quick video lesson.

 

Food for thought

Words should be weighed, not counted.

 

Grammar time

The comma

Why does the sentence 'The boy, whose jacket was torn, asked for help' sound odd?  

If you are using a relative clause to identify the person or thing you are talking about, you shouldn't separate it from the main clause with a comma.  

In 'The boy whose jacket was torn asked for help', the words 'whose jacket was torn' tell us which boy is being referred to. You could only say 'The boy, whose jacket was torn, asked for help' if you had already identified the boy in some other way.

Use commas to separate a relative clause that gives more information, which may be interesting but is not essential, but don't use a comma if the relative clause is essential to the meaning of the sentence.

Indexing: when, how and why?

The best way to find out what indexers do is to try it yourself. Grab an old textbook and go through it from page to page, highlighting every occurrence of names, places, titles and concepts. Go back and type up all the entries into a big table with the page numbers and page ranges included. Sort the whole thing into alphabetical order, and presto! you have an index.

Sounds easy? Here are some things to consider. Have you included all the meaningful references and excluded all the 'mere mentions' that don't really say anything about the subject? Have you included enough subheadings, so that users don't have to look through thirty or forty undifferentiated page references to find the page they want? Have you put cross-references or double entries to link synonymous terms, so that American users looking up 'elevators' find the same pages as British users looking up 'lifts'? Have you got all the correct accents and diacriticals in the foreign words? Where do you put entries for '1914', or 'α-keratenase'? Are you using plural and singular forms correctly, so that users aren't jolted by having to switch back and forth between them? Is it in the format required by your client? And can you trim or expand that index to the required length, and deliver it on time and on budget?

Luckily there are professional indexers who spend their working lives obsessing about these issues. If you can provide an accurate and complete brief, Wordwallah will be glad to quote on providing an index of any desired length or complexity; but remember, we do our best work when we have plenty of notice. Don't leave it till the last minute! 

Word of advice                                                                                                                      Issue 10

 Helping you communicate more effectively                 back to archives