🚀 go-pugleaf

Avi makes an important point about Keywords: if you tag QuickFind to index
that field, browsing and subsearching are MUCH easier and faster. But until
recently, my "Keywords" field was the most under-used in the library. I
could never decide what the best keywords were, nor make the same decisions
on any two days, NOR enter them in a consistent form. [if I could SEE all
my previous Keywords, in an alphabetized index....I'd enter them more
consistently!]

But here's another idea. Just below Keywords is "Abstract", where I've
entered long (500 word+) summaries of books and articles: main
ideas/argument, key passages, Table of Contents. Indexing all that material
would be slow and lengthy, so instead I type into Keywords a "headline" or
super-abstract of the info in Abstract. Then, I create a Style that's a
simple modification: put Keywords at the top, on a line of its own,
followed by the normal style label.
Example (from MLA Generic):

Keywords
Author.  Title.  Secondary Title.  Ed. Secondary Author.  Edition ed.
Number of Volumes vols.  Tertiary Title.  Place Published: Publisher, Year.
 Volume: Pages.

(You must repeat this edit in each of the style's Reference Types.)

Next I go thru the library, selecting about 30 entries at a time to Copy
Format and (using the Word 5.1 PIM) paste them into a Word document. After
pasting all the entries, I turn the Word doc into an Outline, drag the
Keywords line of each entry to the left, and click on "Level 1." All the
item titles hide under their "headlines," and I then run a Word sort. That
pulls the headlines into a rough order, and to my eye (at least) they begin
to suggest ways to arrange the information into topics for further writing
and editing. In this way, I've created a crude early outline of the
research paper, which I can fill by referring again to the longer Abstract
fields, and by inserting proper EN+ citations, where needed.

Not everyone may find this writing method helpful, but you will find that
with ample information in the Keywords field, QuickFind greatly speeds up
browsing and subsearching.

Sorry to be so long-winded. Peace.

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William Howarth                 |            Tel: 609-258-5162
Dept. of English                |
22 McCosh Hall                  |            Fax: 609-258-1607
Princeton University            |
Princeton, NJ  08544            |   howarth@phoenix.princeton.edu
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