Should you build your index from the table of contents or from scratch?
Starting properly this week. Do people work off the existing tables of contents and expand them, or start on a blank page.
5 replies
Accepted answer
Blank page, but keep the table of contents next to you.
The contents are organised the way the material is organised. Your index needs to be organised the way your panic is organised. Those are different things, and the second one is what you need at minute 140.
i started from the contents and regretted it. ended up with a structure that made sense to whoever wrote the materials and not to me, and i kept looking for things under the wrong heading
how far in before you noticed?
too far. maybe 60 pages. i kept it and put a second alphabetical layer on top which mostly fixed it, but it was a lot of wasted work
Alphabetical from the start is the only thing I would tell my past self. Under time you do not think "that was in chapter four", you think of a word. Index the words.
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