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Nancy Smith wondered <<Have any of you tried using
Word's Concordance feature for your indexing? I'm currently
using it for some personal writing but haven't tried it in
tech. writing.>>
Based on the name alone, I'm not inspired to place much
confidence in the tool. All that a concordance does is tell you
what pages a word occurs on; it provides none of the context
that a good index provides, and if the word list is based on a
computer algorithm, it's unlikely to pick meaningful words, or
provide synonyms, cross-references, or any of the other
important aspects of an index. Creating a concordance first
_might_ simplify the task of building an index manually, but
I'm not convinced that this is the case.
OTOH, a concordance is truly useful if you're doing
something much simpler than an index, such as finding out
on which pages Hamlet's name is mentioned, on which pages
Ophelia's name is mentioned, and on which pages they
appear together. Similarly, you could mine a file to find all
occurrences of a specific date (e.g., 1945). Where the context
is less important than the presence or absence of the search
term, a concordance can be a perfectly suitable tool.
