The “Will It Blend” experience of a book index

The joy of BlendTec’s “Will It Blend” videos is that they take expensive, painstakingly produced items — like iPhones — and reduce them to an undifferentiated mess. And that’s just what a book index does to the content in a book.

Writing Without Bullshit covers a wide range of content, because everything is fodder for a writer. That’s why this one book includes part of a Kurt Vonnegut Jr. story, a discussion of the right blood sugar level for writing, a parable about a helicopter company, and a close read of what no one reads, technology company press releases.

This all makes sense in the context of the pages. But the index reveals the Will It Blend version. I love reading indexes, because they jumble everything together. It’s the psychedelic experience of the book, a serendipitous way to see what might be in there. Since I did my own index, I’ve made sure you’ll get every possible chance to discover unsuspected connections.

 

This may be the only place you’ll ever see qualifiers and quaternions together.

Have your SEO with a Serenity Prayer and a shit sandwich:

Paragraphs and passive voice both suck (and what does that have to do with zombies)?

Feed your writing nightmares with fear, failure, fat outlines, and fact checkers.

UNC Professor Rick Clancy is elbow-to-elbow with Poynter scholar Roy Peter Clark, Hillary Clinton . . . and child pornography.

And you’ll learn everything you always wanted to know about jargon.

What did you find in this book that you didn’t expect? And how did you find it?