atw: Re: Last Supper, The

Nancy Mulvaney, in Indexing Books, has this to say about inversion:

   When personal names are cited in an index, the name is often
   inverted so that the surname will be the keyword for sorting.
   If we wish to index Virginia Woolf, we invert the name, as
   in "Woolf, Virginia." This way the important portion of the
   phrase, "Woolf," is pulled forward for alphabetizing. Other
   types of terms are also often inverted. For example, the text
   may refer to a "holographic will." In the index this term may
   appear as "wills, holographic."

She then gives some examples of problematic entries in an old DOS book,
such as A Tree of Files, Some More Useful Batch Files, The Backspace Key.
'It is unlikely that someone looking for information about batch files will
think of looking up "Some More Useful Batch Files" in the S's."'
---
Stuart Burnfield
Information Developer
IBM Australia Development Laboratory (ADL), Perth

austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 08/12/2006 10:05:57 AM:

> I've only even known it as "inversion of the initial article" but I'm
> not sure that's the word or phase you're looking for?

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