Don’t Laugh

I just started a graduate course offered through–don’t laugh–the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  Title of the course?  “Basic Indexing”.  What IS it?  It is designed to teach people who want to be come professional indexers how to do it.

And what does a professional indexer do? 

That is the person who connects you, the reader, with the content the author has written.  It’s the person who actually creates the back-of-the-book index in your textbook or latest non-fiction read.  (And, in most cases, it’s not the author of the book who writes the index.)  Big whoop, you say? 

Have you ever been frustrated because you looked up a topic in the index of a book, only to find when you turned to the pages indicated, the topic or name was only mentioned there with no real information having been given?  Blame the indexer.  Have you ever had the pleasure of looking something up in the index, turning to the page number given, and finding just what you’d hoped to find?  Thank the indexer! 

I had to laugh (inside) as I was reading through part of my first assignment for this course. I got so excited! 

It made me think of the place in the movie You’ve Got Mail  where the Meg Ryan character Kathleen Kelly has just been bemoaning the fact that all she does is run a children’s book store.  And, her live-in boyfriend whose name I can’t remember at the moment, quickly retorts that she just does this incredibly noble thing of helping people become who they’re going to be.  (Don’t quote me on that one–but if you’ve seen the movie, you know exactly the place I’m talking about.)

Who reads a book and thinks about or even knows that there is someone who wrote that book’s index? 

I realized that this whole notion excites me because of what motivates me:  my mission in life is connecting people with the truth.  I’ve generally done that in the context of teaching, or, more recently, writing.  But as I’m coming to understand the nature of indexing, I see that this is more of the same. 

Pretty cool.