The “Will It Blend” experience of a book index

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Photo: Blendtec

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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