Indexing and Audience Analysis

Screenshot of Indexing assignment

Project Description

In my Indexing class, students learned how to analyze texts, their intended audience, and create indexes highlighting that would enhance the text's user experience.

Learning Outcomes

  • Analyze and respond to rhetorical situations
  • Demonstrate mastery of craft through attention to detail
  • Utillize online technology to create and deliver content

The subject of my indexing project is a webhelp project created with Adobe Robohelp. This project intended to teach educators the methodology behind creating an educational video (storeboarding/outlining) and the process to edit videos either using Adobe Premiere or Techsmith's Camtasia.

Reflection

For this project, I had to select an artifact, analyze it and the situation it addresses, and create an index for it. I decided to take this opportunity to improve on a group web help project I worked on from another class. This project essentially contains three sections:

  • the methodology, going over how to organize details for your topic
  • Adobe Premier, highlighting features and processes to edit videos
  • Techsmith's Camtasia, highlighting features and processes to record and edit videos

Being a co-author of this project, I already had a mental image of the target audience. This document was created with each instructor in the Rhetoric and Writing department in mind with plenty of teaching experience but may lack video creation/editing experience. Knowing the original rhetorical situation gave me a head start for developing this index. Building the index into this project was a must for usability. I selected each keyword or phrase by thinking about these scenarios and original problems/requirements.

Using Robohelp, I created a web-friendly page for the index to link sections from the original web help document. This tool enables writers to author in one place and output to many others. Building this project with the same web tool would be the most appropriate method to support the original project since users wouldn't interact with it like a .pdf or even a standard web page. For this index to be useful, it had to be accessible within the project and not a separate piece.