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Geoff is right, of course! What I expect will happen -- if I ever finish
the personal writing that I am trying to index in this manner -- is that I
will then have to do a close editing of the results.
The advantage to me on this particular project is that I can refer to the
concordance that I'm generating to see the current list of words that will
appear in the index. Otherwise, when I'm indexing I can get pretty
confused -- and *still* have a lot of editing to do at the end.
That's why I was wondering if anyone else has actually done this -- and how
it worked!
Nancy
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Technical Writers List; for all Technical Communication issues
> [mailto:TECHWR-L -at- listserv -dot- okstate -dot- edu]On Behalf Of Geoff Hart
> Sent: Thursday, July 29, 1999 11:57 AM
> To: TECHWR-L -at- listserv -dot- okstate -dot- edu
> Subject: Word's concordance feature?
>
>
> 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.
>
> --Geoff Hart @8^{)} Pointe-Claire, Quebec
> geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
>
> "Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from
> acquiring the deadening effect of a habit." -William Somerset Maugham
>
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