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Overheard a librarian at the reference desk say 'the index is the real table of contents'
She was helping some kid find a book on civil war letters and I realized I've been skimming footnotes for years but never actually used an index to jump straight to the good parts, has anyone else noticed how much faster research gets when you lean on the index first?
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oliver24218d ago
You just described my entire college experience. I wasted so much time flipping through pages when the index was right there the whole time. It's like a cheat code for books.
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faith_schmidt18d ago
Oh interesting, I actually see it the opposite way. Flipping through pages is how you stumble onto stuff you didn't know you needed, the index just confirms what you already want. The real discovery happens when you let your eyes wander, not when you treat a book like a search engine.
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