Question: what is the most important part of any technical manual?
Answer: would you believe it is the INDEX?
Why? Because I don’t know of a single whitepaper user who wouldn’t immediately jump to the index and start looking up the words and terms that matter most to them.
And the feeling of frustration and disappointment is very real when the user can’t find an index in the back.
You must provide an index and do it well if you are writing a manual of more than 30 or 40 pages.
So how do you do it? What are the tricks of the trade?
First, make sure you understand the important difference between a TOC (table of contents) and an index. A TOC presents topics in the linear order in which the reader encounters them in the book. It’s a (and very useful) summary of “what comes after what topic”.
An index, on the other hand, is an ALPHABETICAL order of the IMPORTANT TERMS and CONCEPTS that are covered in the manual.
So without really understanding what the manual is about, you can’t write an index because you won’t be able to determine what’s important from the reader’s (or end user’s) point of view.
That is the reason why there are many professional indexers with their own organizations creating indexes as a lucrative full-time profession.
However, there are no professional TOC creators, as it is a mechanical compilation that is usually done by simply clicking the “Create TOC” button.