[Hitch]

Here's a question and a ponderment:

Should someone that does not understand the difference between an index (subject matter index, back of book, not a TOC) and a concordance actually be writing a non-fiction book? I mean...if you don't understand that indices are curated, and you think that you can just slap some subject matter word list to a bookmaker somewhere, to compile a concordance for you, why have an index at all?????

GRUMBLE.

Spoiler:

I've got not one, not two but THREE, three men who don't understand indices versus concordances and seem to think that they can just slap a word list on us and voila, out pops a perfectly designed, ready to go index.
Which is not what happens. Of course, they naturally don't want to pay for commercial indexing. Heavens forfend.

Nope, they think that by wishing and clicking, sure 'nuff, they'll get the equivalent "this other way."

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. My hands are coming off this week from explaining it, over and over. WHAT is so hard to understand? I keep asking if they are going to do the manual marking of the index entries, (in Word or the like), or if they're going to give us a word list and then REMOVE Those entries that they don't want, after the "index-cum-concordance" is built, or...? And it's like that whole deer-in-the-headlights thing. But I strongly suspect that part of the deer thing is that core unwillingness to just do the work.

And of course, at least two of them ran out and found "magic" software that what--yup, you guessed it--builds a concordance form a Word list. I sometimes wonder WHY I SPEAK AT ALL

Hitch