Jewish Council

How to Create a Table of Contents for a Doctoral Dissertation

There are some students who attempt to create a table of content for their academic papers manually. It is likely that such students are not aware that there is a very effective process that is built in word processors. When attempting to create a this page manually, most students quickly get frustrated and give up due to the problems that arise with respect to the format. However, there is a wonderful fix for this problem. Here are three simple and useful steps on how to create a table of contents for a doctoral dissertation. After following these steps, you can be sure of presenting a great looking paper.

Step 1

The first step on how to create a table of contents for a doctoral dissertation is finding the formatting toolbar. In order to locate the formatting toolbar, just look at the top of the word processor page. In case it is not visible, it means the toolbar is not opened. You can however open the formatting toolbar by clicking on the view tab and then moving down the menu to toolbar. There are several options here, but you are only interested in the formatting toolbar.

Step 2

The second step on how to create a table of contents for a doctoral dissertation is assigning headings to the different sections of the paper. You need to give each section of your paper a heading in order to create a chapter or division for the paper. The heading could be something like “introduction”. In order to create the headings, you have to use the menu that is on the left top side of the screen. After this, you have to click on the tab labeled “Heading 1” and then type the desired title or heading and click return. This process can be started as you write the paper or after you finish writing the paper.

Step 3

After creating all the headings for each section of your paper, the next step is creating the actual table of contents. At this stage, you are almost done. You first need to create or leave a blank page at the beginning of the document. You will then need to go to the toolbar section and click on insert, select reference, and then select index and finally tables. After doing this, a window will appear. You will then click on “table of contents” and then click on okay.

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