Now I’d like to walk through the process of selecting terms and writing an index. As an example, I’ll be using a simple nursery rhyme as the text. Using a nursery rhyme may initially appear to be an odd choice, but I have found that using such a simple and familiar text helps students to better focus on the indexing process itself.

To begin, let me introduce the information questions that should be asked as one reads a text with my article Term Selection Putting Humpty Dumpty Together, At Last.pdf

Now, I’d like to duplicate the process discussed in the Humpty Dumpty article by demonstrating it with The Queen of Tarts nursery rhyme.

The Queen of Hearts
She made some tarts
All on a summer's day;
The Knave of Hearts
He stole those tarts,
And took them clean away.
The King of Hearts
Called for the tarts,
And beat the knave full sore:
The Knave of Hearts
Brought back the tarts,
And vowed he's steal no more

By asking the information questions and using the thematic mindset to arrange the answers to those questions in a thematic index structure. This will require a certain suspension of disbelief as we imagine each line to be a book chapter as the index is written. Remember that function words (A, An, The) are ignored in both main headings and subheadings. In addition, conjunctions and prepositions are also ignored in the sort of subheadings.

C
crime. See tart theft

F
forgiveness
the knave's request for, 11–12
by the queen and king, 12
See also restitution

J
justice
debate over punishment vs. restorative, 9
restitution element of, 11–12

K
King of Hearts
informed of the tart theft, 7–8
investigation and justice dispensed by, 9
Knave of Hearts
punished by the king, 9
restitution and repentance by, 11–12
tart-stealing by, 4–5

Q
Queen of Hearts
tarts made by, 1–2
tarts stolen from the, 5–6

R
restitution
legal vs. emotional significance of, 10
of the tarts by the knave, 11
See also forgiveness

T
tart theft
description of the, 5–6
the king's investigation of the, 8
punishment of the knave for the, 9

Compare the above index with this example which is includes all of the main characters and events but lacks the concepts and themes that convey the true essence of the rhyme. Compared to the example above, it is an empty shell lacking the rich detail included in the first one. Which index version do you think would be more useful to the reader?

J

justice, 9, 11-12

K
King of Hearts, 7–9
Knave of Hearts, 4–5 , 9, 11–12

Q
Queen of Hearts, 1–2, 5–6

T
tart theft, 5–6, 8, 9

Obviously no one would actually index a text as small as a nursery rhyme, but this does demonstrate how an index structure should represent not only the facts but also the nuanced meaning and themes as expressed by the author. To provide anything else is a disservice to both the book and the readers.

There are a lot of theories on the process of learning and, as a long time instructor, I've come to understand the value of applying principles of learning to curriculum. In this section I have "clumped" a lot of new information on using a thematic mindset for index term selection. And now I'd like to use the learning principle of spacing effect and allow you some time to think about and consider this new information. I'll be returning to the topic of term selection in Module 6 when we will take up identifying the metatopic of a text and main heading topics.