Table of contents why is it important

The ToC is a good guide for your own writing — At a basic level, chapters divide a book into manageable chunks—whether that division is in terms of plot, theme, food types for recipes, periods in history, or anything else. Break apart your subject into discrete sections you can handle, and your book will be that much easier to write. You are commenting using your WordPress.

You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Go to Ascentive. Ascentive Blog Ascentive. May 23, By Bryan Keithley. What do you think?

A table of contents is a crucial component of an academic thesis. As a rule of thumb, your table of contents will usually come after your title page , abstract, acknowledgement or preface. This allows you to formulate a structure and think through your topic and how you are going to research, answer and make your argument. Knowing how your chapters are going to be ordered and what topics or research questions are included in each will help immensely when it comes to your writing.

The table of contents is not just an academic formality, it allows your examiner to quickly get a feel for your topic and understand how your dissertation will be presented. An unclear or sloppy table of contents may even have an adverse effect on your grade because the dissertation is difficult to follow.

Examiners are readers, after all, and a dissertation is an exercise in producing an argument. Your table of contents section will come after your acknowledgements and before your introduction. It includes a list of all your headers and their respective pages and will also contain a sub-section listing your tables, figures or illustrations if you are using them. In general, your thesis can be ordered like this:.

Title Page 2. Abstract 4. Acknowledgement, Dedication and Preface optional 5. Table of Contents 6. Chapters 8. Appendices 9. Endnotes depending on your formatting The formatting of your table of contents will depend on your academic field and thesis length. Some disciplines, like the sciences, have a methodical structure which includes recommended subheadings on methodology, data results, discussion and conclusion.

Humanities subjects, on the other hand, are far more varied. Whichever discipline you are working in, you need to create an organized list of all chapters in their order of appearance, with chapter subheadings clearly labelled. Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………………………….. These are listed with the chapter number, followed by a decimal point and the subheading number. Chapter 1 1.

The key to writing a good table of contents is consistency and accuracy. You cannot list subheadings for one chapter and forget them for another. Subheadings are not always required but they can be very helpful if you are dealing with a detailed topic. The page numbers in the table of contents must match with the respective pages in your thesis or manuscript. So long as you remain both accurate and consistent, your table of contents will be perfect. Fortunately, the days of manually writing a contents page are over.

You can still produce a contents page manually with Microsoft Word, but consider using their automatic feature to guarantee accuracy and save time. To produce an automatically-generated table of contents, you must first work with heading styles.

Select top-level headings your chapter titles and apply the Heading 1 style. This ensures that they will be formatted as main headings. Second-level headings subheadings can be applied with the Heading 2 style. This will place them underneath and within each main heading. This option will allow you to automatically produce a page with accurate page links to your document.

Different academic papers or dissertations might require different styles of a table of contents. Some of them might require numbered and some non-numbered tables of contents, therefore, authors should check if there is any preferred style for the table of contents.

The content included in the table of contents should always be clear and not too long. In order to create a table of contents in Microsoft Word, authors should firstly define what they want to include in this part. Secondly, they should select the text, choosing the heading style e.

Heading 1 or Heading 2 and applying it. It must be done carefully for each title that the author wants to include in the table of contents. Next, there are several steps to follow when you open Microsoft Word. The following instructions refer to Word , Word , Word and Word Click on the top of the page where you want the table of contents to be added.

Go to the Reference toolbar, then click on the Table of Contents and choose an Automatic Table style. Please, note that if you choose an Automatic Table, each change you will further make in the text will be automatically updated in the table of contents. In addition, there is also an option to click on the Manual Table of Contents style. You can choose the approach which is more convenient for you. There is an option to customise your own table of contents by clicking on Insert Table of Contents.

The Table of Contents dialog box will appear where you can choose whether you want to show page numbers or not and choose the most appropriate tab leader. Select what you consider the most suitable for your paper and click OK. For creating your own style you should click Modify and new dialog box will open:. TOCs represent different kind of styles and by selecting the first one and clicking OK the following dialog box would appear:.

If you decide to create a table of contents manually, you should avoid adding the rows of periods between the headings and the page numbers.