Creating A Good Dissertation Contents Page: Effective Tips

While writing a dissertation, the most important thing is to organize. You cannot make a better start than by creating a methodical contents page. This indexes the work and makes its content easily searchable.

  • You need to include all segments in this page, barring the tertiary ones like copyright page. There are specific rules you need to abide by. For instance, the pages should all be numbered in Roman numerals (I, II and so on).
  • You should begin by emboldening Table of Contents and center-aligning it. You should then map out every page, with headings and subheadings. The greater divisions will command indentation (similar tabs).
  • If one entry goes down for 2 lines, the second line should be indented by 3 character spaces. You should mention the main heading of the segment in capital letters.
  • You should align with relevant pages and make sure that the headings and subheadings all pass the muster. You should check and double-check whether you have made the alignments perfectly or not.
  • The different entries should have double space in between. Meanwhile, the same entry should have single space amid its different lines. The fonts should be 12 pts Times New Roman, for an official appearance.

The positioning

The contents page ideally makes an appearance just after the abstract. Thus, you know the positioning and can hardly make any mistake there. It holds its own importance just as the appendix page. When you index the pages well, people searching for a particular segment can get to that rather conveniently.

You may argue that the dissertation is itself quite exhausting and takes up much of your mental resource. In this light, it is extra burden to be scrupulous with the contents page. The counter argument is that when you have labored so much for the research page, you can authenticate and organize its structure through this page with a genial amount of labor.

More pages to labor

Clearly, the contents page cannot boast to be the most important section of the paper. It is however one page that you should endeavor to prepare yourself. It gives you a picture of your paper (supposing you have not prepared the paper). You become more sure-footed with the presentation.

You can check out the format style tips and resolute samples to get a picture of how the content pages should be ideally assorted. There is nothing better than getting a resourceful idea.

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