After some thought and some revision, the following is the result of my ordering of these words in alphabetical order.
| Original list | Aphlabetical order |
|---|---|
|
|
Did you put The Hague under T or H?
I put anything starting with 'The' under its following word. This is because people are more likely to ignore the 'The'.
Did you put El Paso under E or P?
I placed this Under P.
Which came first in your list, Newark or New York?
I placed New York before Newark because I placed symbols, numbers and special characters before letters and a space is a special character in my eyes.
Does St. Louis come before or after Saint Nicholas?
St. Louis was placed after Saint Nicholas, as 't' comes after 'a' in the alphabet.
How did you handle numbers, punctuation, and special characters?
I placed all of these before the letters of the alphabet. This was a personal preference and this is where I would look for them if I was going through a list. The order these were put was guided by no specific rule, just what I felt was the right order.
Assuming the italicised terms are book titles, what might be a more useful way to organise this list?
Well, since the book titles tend to start with more than just letters, it would be more logical and much more useful to organise these by their author. This is something many people would look for if the title wasn't found straight away.
If the cities represent places you've visited and the book titles are ones you've read, how could chronology be used to order the list in a more meaningful way?
This list would be organized in a much more meaningful way for me, the one who has read or visited these places. This is because I would know exactly where to look on the list without any confusion. Others may find the list to appear as being random though, which isn't very meaningful for them.
At first when I looked over this list, I was expecting an easy ordering of the list. After a day or two, when I found time to actually go through the list and make decisions about what goes where and having to justify each choice, I started to question everything. I had to make decisions and apply rules that I just trusted were 'correct'. After completing this ordering, I googled websites that would organize these for me and I found that even these different websites didn't organize them all the same way. Some of these sites include-
http://alphabetizer.flap.tv/
http://www.textfixer.com/tools/alphabetize-text-words.php
http://www.alphabetize.org/
Take care,
Riley Van Zeeland.
