The Value of a Working Table of Contents for Your Thesis or Dissertation
Although every student working on a thesis or dissertation begins the project with the best of intentions and an ideal outline in mind, it often proves difficult to stick to those initial plans as the text begins to unfold and its complexities grow in number and depth. The first draft of a thesis or dissertation might exceed word limits or turn out a good deal shorter than intended. It might neglect important aspects of the research behind it or include long and unnecessary digressions. By designing a working table of contents before you begin writing, you provide yourself with an excellent tool for keeping your discussion on track and your text within length requirements as you write. For this reason and others, many departments and mentors will insist that you create a working table of contents or similarly detailed outline before you begin drafting the thesis or dissertation itself.
A working table of contents should start with a title. This title may change somewhat as you write, but a working title will help you focus your thoughts as you devise the headings and plan the content for the main parts, chapters, sections and subsections that should be added beneath it. All headings, whether numbered or not, should be formatted in effective and consistent ways that distinguish section levels and clearly represent the overall structure of the thesis or dissertation. These headings can also be altered as your writing advances, but they will provide an effective outline of what you need to discuss and the order in which you think the main topics should be presented. At this initial stage, it is also a good idea to write under each heading a brief summary or list of what you hope to include in that part of the document. You can then continue to add, adjust and move material around within and among the sections as your table of contents and ultimately your text progresses. Reminders of how long (measured in words, paragraphs or pages) the entire text and each of its parts should ideally be may also be worth including.
Once you have your annotated table of contents drafted, it will serve as an informative guide to both content and structure that can be productively consulted as you write. Assuming you create your working table of contents as a computer file in the same program you intend to use for writing your entire thesis or dissertation, you can also use this table of contents as a template for composing the text, replacing your notes under each heading with complete sentences and paragraphs as you work. This practice lends an immediate physical presence to the guidance provided by your table of contents because you are literally working within that outline, which is especially wise if you have a tendency to run on or become distracted by new ideas as you write.
Finally, your working table of contents can become the final table of contents for your thesis or dissertation. If you would like to use your working table of contents in this way and are also using it as a template, be sure to rename the file and save a separate copy before you begin adding the formal text of your thesis or dissertation. Then you can simply delete your summaries and rough notes from the original table of contents to produce your final one, leaving only the headings, to which you can eventually add the relevant page numbers.
Why Our Editing and Proofreading Services?
At Proof-Reading-Service.com we offer the highest quality journal article editing, dissertation proofreading and online proofreading services via our large and extremely dedicated team of academic and scientific professionals. All of our proofreaders are native speakers of English who have earned their own postgraduate degrees, and their areas of specialisation cover such a wide range of disciplines that we are able to help our international clientele with research editing to improve and perfect all kinds of academic manuscripts for successful publication. Many of the carefully trained members of our manuscript editing and proofreading team work predominantly on articles intended for publication in scholarly journals, applying painstaking journal editing standards to ensure that the references and formatting used in each paper are in conformity with the journal’s instructions for authors and to correct any grammar, spelling, punctuation or simple typing errors. In this way, we enable our clients to report their research in the clear and accurate ways required to impress acquisitions proofreaders and achieve publication.
Our scientific proofreading services for the authors of a wide variety of scientific journal papers are especially popular, but we also offer manuscript proofreading services and have the experience and expertise to proofread and edit manuscripts in all scholarly disciplines, as well as beyond them. We have team members who specialise in medical proofreading services, and some of our experts dedicate their time exclusively to dissertation proofreading and manuscript proofreading, offering academics the opportunity to improve their use of formatting and language through the most exacting PhD thesis editing and journal article proofreading practices. Whether you are preparing a conference paper for presentation, polishing a progress report to share with colleagues, or facing the daunting task of editing and perfecting any kind of scholarly document for publication, a qualified member of our professional team can provide invaluable assistance and give you greater confidence in your written work.
If you are in the process of preparing an article for an academic or scientific journal, or planning one for the near future, you may well be interested in a new book, Guide to Journal Publication, which is available on our Tips and Advice on Publishing Research in Journals website.
