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This is really a matter for personal preference. There's no provably right answer. Personally, for my books, I didn't worry about the index until about the 4th draft. When I was basically happy wi...
Answer
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T07:09:38Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/30834 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
Jay
·
2019-12-08T07:09:38Z (almost 5 years ago)
This is really a matter for personal preference. There's no provably right answer. Personally, for my books, I didn't worry about the index until about the 4th draft. When I was basically happy with the text, then I stated thinking about terms that might be worth indexing. I'd think of a word I wanted to index, then do text searches on that word and add the index reference. (I'm using MS Word and not Latex, but the principle is the same.) Then I browsed through fairly quickly looking for other words that might be worth indexing. "a lot more work re-reading" By the time your book/article/whatever is done, you should have read and re-read it many, many times. Maybe some people can just throw text on paper and it's perfect the first time. For most of us, we have to go back over to clean up spelling and grammar errors. Then again to find continuity problems, places where the text is unclear, etc etc etc. One more pass looking for index terms should be a fairly trivial extra effort.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2017-10-16T14:43:27Z (about 7 years ago)
Original score: 1