Real-Life Math
Indexers hold many jobs. You must read books and communicate with
editors. If you freelance, you must search out more work. You may even communicate
with the writer of the book on occasion.
However, your most important
job is constructing the indexes that will lead readers to the information
they need.
Your current project is building an index for a non-fiction
home health book. To do that, you read the book and list key terms that are
important to the ideas being addressed.
It's kind of like piecing together
a puzzle. You need to analyze each word, phrase and paragraph and decide if
any word or group of words would be useful as a quick reference to finding
information in the book. It requires a keen eye and attention
to detail.
Working through this current project, you have listed the
words that you think are important to the index and all of the pages that
each word appears on. Now you have to put the index together.
Doing
so requires that you key all of the entries in and determine the number of
entries you can fit into the given space. The number of entries is determined
by the space available and the number of lines an entry occupies. For this
index, you have 4 pages to list all of the relevant entries.
Each page
will have 2 columns of 32 lines each. Only 1 entry can be listed on each line.
How many entries must you cut if you have listed 198 single line entries,
37 double-line entries, and 9 triple-line entries?
"Back-of-the-book
indexers must be able to calculate characters per column width because they
are often given page limits for the indexes," says indexer Christine Jacobs.
"These are general math skills, not calculus or advanced forms of math, but
they are necessary all the same."