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Subject:Re: Nancy Burn's Glossary Suggestion From:Mike Pope <mikep -at- ASYMETRIX -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 30 Mar 1994 12:27:00 PST
I posted the original question about whether people are indexing glossaries.
Here's part of a reply I made to Andreas Ramos (I thought I'd repeat it for
the forum at large, see what other people suggested):
We ended up taking the references to the glossary out of our last
effort on the theory that we were still and
also pointing them to where in the text we originally defined the word
or phrase; as I said in another email,
we favored giving them the definition with as much context as possible
(and since the glossary tended just
to repeat this same definition).
Lori Lathrop had a comprehensive reply (q.v.), which in essence said "it
depends". If one does index both the glossary and the original definition
(the one in the margin, for example), isn't this perhaps a redundancy?
-- Mike Pope
mikep -at- asymetrix -dot- com
----------
>From: TECHWR-L
>To: Multiple recipients of list TECHWR-L
>Subject: Nancy Burn's Glossary Suggestion
>Date: Wednesday, March 30, 1994 10:54AM
>A couple of days ago, Nancy posted the suggestion that terms be defined
both
>in
>the text (in the margins perhaps), as well as being included in the
glossary.
>I think she has a great idea.
>Some of the other recent postings have pointed out that for a user's guide
the
>in-text approach would be better. On the other hand for a reference manual
>the
>glossary method would be better (although even in a user's guide the same
term
>might be used in many places). As an ex engineer, I've certainly read all
>kinds of manuals. I would certainly appreciate having both methods in the
>same manual.
>As a new tech writer, I never hought about including index entries for the
>glossary. Someone who's message I unfortunately deleted too fast suggested
>this-great idea.
