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Guidelines

Overview

The purpose of the Term Selection Exercises is to provide practice at identifying the important, index-worthy information contained in texts. This is not designed to practice formatting and making an index. It is only to help train the mind to focus on one essential question: Is this information worth including in the index? These decisions cannot be made in a vaccuum and I will provide a context for your responses. Text pieces will be selected from the Web and posted to the list. These selections should be about 4-5 printed pages long and should contain indexable information. No topics are necessarily out-of-bounds, but care should be taken that the material is well-written and accessible.

Context of the Text

You should consider that the material (obviously short, because these are exercises) is part of a larger work on the subject. Therefore, be careful about the meta-topic of the text. Pretend that there are subsequent chapters dealing with related or similar information. You have instructions to provide an average density index (average for technical or scholarly material may be slightly higher than for general-interest material). You have been told to avoid indexing passing mentions. Do not feel obligated to include every proper noun. Of course, that's the point here: what is a passing mention and what is indexable?

Method of Indicating Selections

In going through the term selection process, remember that we will need to be able to compare selections. You should pretend that you are highlighting the material that contains the indexable information. Since we cannot actually do this, you will have to indicate your selections by typing the text that you would highlight. For example, in the following passage I have indicated indexable terms that I might select:

Von Holtzbrinck houses now require that 50 copies be sold in each of four consecutive accounting periods (a total of two years), in any combination of formats, to prevent reversion of all rights. Penguin Putnam has set a higher number of 300 copies per year. Many publishers have also taken to adopting first and second positions; their boilerplate language will assume the vagueness of the Random paper, but upon further request, more specific language will be provided, though this isn't guaranteed.

You'll notice that boilerplate language is pretty vague and certainly wouldn't appear in the index in this way. The language to which they are referring is contract language. But for purposes of our exercise, we can simply type boilerplate language and everyone will know what we are talking about. The same can be said for reversion of all rights. For the above example, then, I have the following list:

Von Holtzbrinck houses, reversion of all rights, Penguin Putnam, boilerplate language.

If you wanted to indicate the concept of sales mininums, you might need to add those words yourself since they don't appear in the text. You could type the shortest, most easily understood reference to the concept that you can:

Von Holtzbrinck houses, sales mininums, reversion of all rights, Penguin Putnam, boilerplate language.

No further work needs to be done here. If this were an indexing exercise, then we would certainly refine the wording, add double posts or cross-references, alphabetize, and generally fix it up. That is not what these exercises are for.

Indicate Paragraph Numbers

You should indicate your selections by paragraph, not by page number. We will need to view the selections in paragraph number order so that we can compare our selections. Here is the format for indicating your selections:

Paragraph #. Terms
3. Von Holtzbrinck houses, sales mininums, reversion of all rights, Penguin Putnam, boilerplate language

This should be pretty clear and allow us to easily look at each others' selections and say "what did so-and-so select in paragraph 3?"

In a book, with text on a printed page, we would not necessarily indicate information by paragraph. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to denote page breaks on web-based material. So, treat each paragraph as if it were a page. If the next paragraph contains indexable information on "Penguin Putnam," then mark it anew. The key here is that the paragraph contain indexable information.

Time Limits

I would recommend a time limit for doing these exercises. While I cannot enforce this, I think it helps people to focus on the lesson, go through the decision-making process quickly, and move on. There are some learning theories that maintain that speed is a necessary ingredient for mastery of a skill. For a printed page, I would say 3 minutes should be enough time. For a 4-5 page exercise, then, 12-15 minutes should suffice. This can vary with text density, etc. There is no need for these exercises to be onerous, though, and you might feel more inclined to participate if you think that it will only take a few minutes of your valuable time. I would ask that you include the time it took you to complete the exercise in the subject line of the message and at the top of your submission, with your name and the exercise #

Dan Connolly, Ex. #16, 10 min.

You should note the time it took you to read the text and select the terms (not necessarily the time to type it, and especially not the time to download or print it).

Right or Wrong?

There are no right or wrong answers. Everyone can learn from each other by discussing the results. I would encourage people to discuss the exercise after waiting for others to finish posting their results. Constructive feedback will be welcomed. Mockery will not be tolerated.