A table of contents is very important at the beginning of a writing project for two important reasons. Firstly, it helps the reader easily locate contents of particular topics itemized as chapters or subtitles. Secondly, it helps the writer arrange their work and organize their thoughts so that important sections of an academic project are not left out. This has the extra effect of helping to manage the reader’s expectation of any academic essay or thesis right from the beginning.
1. Title Page
2. Copyright / Statement of Originality
3. Abstract
4. Acknowledgement, Dedication and Preface (optional)
5. Table of Contents
6. List of Figures/Tables/Illustrations
7. Chapters
8. Appendices
9. Endnotes (depending on your formatting)
10. Bibliography / References
The table of contents is an organized listing of your document’s chapters, sections and, often, figures, clearly labelled by page number. Readers should be able to look at your table of contents page and understand immediately how your paper is organized, enabling them to skip to any relevant section or sub-section. The table of contents should list all front matter, main content and back matter, including the headings and page numbers of all chapters and the bibliography . A good table of contents should be easy to read, accurately formatted and completed last so that it is 100% accurate. Although you can complete a table of contents manually, many word processing tools like Microsoft Word enable you to format your table of contents automatically.
When adding the finishing touches to your dissertation, the table of contents is one of the most crucial elements. It helps the reader navigate (like a map) through your argument and topic points. Adding a table of contents is simple and can be inserted easily after you have finished writing your paper. In this guide, we look at the do’s and don’ts of a table of contents
Where do you put a table of contents?
To write a table of contents, you first write the title or chapter names of your research paper in chronological order. Secondly, you write the subheadings or subtitles, if you have them in your paper. After that, you write the page numbers for the corresponding headings and subheadings. You can also very easily set up a table of contents in Microsoft Word.
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:
When adding the finishing touches to your dissertation, the table of contents is one of the most crucial elements. It helps the reader navigate (like a map) through your argument and topic points. Adding a table of contents is simple and it can be inserted easily after you have finished writing your paper. In this guide, we look at the do’s and don’ts of a table of contents
Examiners are readers, after all, and a dissertation is an exercise in producing an argument. A clear table of contents will give both a good impression and provide an accurate roadmap to make the examiner’s job easier and your argument more persuasive.
In-text citations must provide the name of the author or authors and the year the source was published. (When a given source does not list an individual author, you may provide the source title or the name of the organization that published the material instead.) When directly quoting a source, it is also required that you include the page number where the quote appears in your citation.
Visually, the hierarchy of information is organized as indicated in Table 13.1 “Section Headings”.
- Section headings use centered, boldface type. Headings use title case, with important words in the heading capitalized.
- Subsection headings use left-aligned, boldface type. Headings use title case.
- The third level uses left-aligned, indented, boldface type. Headings use a capital letter only for the first word, and they end in a period.
- The fourth level follows the same style used for the previous level, but the headings are boldfaced and italicized.
- The fifth level follows the same style used for the previous level, but the headings are italicized and not boldfaced.
- MLA style. Determined by the Modern Languages Association and used for papers in literature, languages, and other disciplines in the humanities.
- Chicago style. Outlined in the Chicago Manual of Style and sometimes used for papers in the humanities and the sciences
Headings
APA style uses section headings to organize information, making it easy for the reader to follow the writer’s train of thought and to know immediately what major topics are covered. Depending on the length and complexity of the paper, its major sections may also be divided into subsections, sub-subsections, and so on. These smaller sections, in turn, use different heading styles to indicate different levels of information. In essence, you are using headings to create a hierarchy of information.
David Epstein’s book Junk Food, Junk Science (2010) pointed out that “junk food cannot be considered addictive in the same way that we think of psychoactive drugs as addictive” (p. 137).
Write an abstract summarizing your paper. Briefly introduce the topic, state your findings, and sum up what conclusions you can draw from your research. Use the word count feature of your word-processing program to make sure your abstract does not exceed one hundred fifty words.
The next page of your paper provides an abstract , or brief summary of your findings. An abstract does not need to be provided in every paper, but an abstract should be used in papers that include a hypothesis. A good abstract is concise—about one hundred fifty to two hundred fifty words—and is written in an objective, impersonal style. Your writing voice will not be as apparent here as in the body of your paper. When writing the abstract, take a just-the-facts approach, and summarize your research question and your findings in a few sentences.
Believe it or not, but many professional writers start such papers from the body. Here you have to place the Methodology Section where you establish the methods of data collection and the results of it. Usually, all main graphs or charts are placed here as a way to convey the results. All additional materials are gathered in the appendices.
This is, perhaps, the most important part of the paper. As this is the most scientific paper from all the papers you will have to write in your studies, it calls for the most logical and clear approach. Thus, your intro should consist of:
Creating a rough draft of the paper is your chance to save some time and nerves. Once you’ve done it, you get a clear picture of what to write about and what points should be worked through.
We hope that our guideline on how to write a statistics paper example unveiled the mystery of writing such papers.
The intro section
Remember to jot down all the needed information for the proper referencing when you use a resource
Here are some life hacks and shortcuts that you may use to boost your paper:
If you want to create the paper that can serve as an example of well-written statistics research paper example, then here is a guideline that will help you to master this task.
Collecting data for the analysis is another headache. Research papers of this type call for the data taken from the most reliable and relevant sources because no indeterminate information is inadmissible here.
You also do not need to write the word “page” or use its abbreviated form of “p.” or “pp.” All it needs is the number.
Notice that unlike in-text citations, there is no “p.” or “pp.” preceding the page numbers.
APA style, page number are recommended (but optional) for paraphrasing, and required for direct quotations from sources with page numbers.
“It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them” (Rand, 2019, pp. 12-13)
3. Reference list
- At the top of every page (including the title page, body, appendices, etc.)
- Placed in the header
- Flush against the right margin
- In the same font and size as the rest of your paper
Articles in periodicals (e.g., journals, newspapers, magazines, etc.) include page numbers in their references. The page number or page number range are formatted as the following:
Every page written in APA style needs to have the page number listed at the top right corner of the paper. It also needs to appear on every page. It should also appear on the title page of the paper, as well as every page of the appendices, footnotes, and other supplemental sections.
The brief citations included in the body of your paper correspond to the more detailed citations provided at the end of the paper in the references section. In-text citations provide basic information—the author’s name, the publication date, and the page number if necessary—while the references section provides more extensive bibliographical information. Again, this information allows your reader to follow up on the sources you cited and do additional reading about the topic if desired.
This chapter provides detailed guidelines for using the citation and formatting conventions developed by the American Psychological Association, or APA. Writers in disciplines as diverse as astrophysics, biology, psychology, and education follow APA style. The major components of a paper written in APA style are listed in the following box.
- Headings and, if necessary, subheadings to organize the content
- In-text citations of research sources
- References page
If you find that the rules of proper source documentation are difficult to keep straight, you are not alone. Writing a good research paper is, in and of itself, a major intellectual challenge. Having to follow detailed citation and formatting guidelines as well may seem like just one more task to add to an already-too-long list of requirements.
Writing at Work
While all the formatting and citation styles have their own use and applications, in this chapter we focus our attention on the two styles you are most likely to use in your academic studies: APA and MLA.
Another variation is to introduce the author and the source title in your sentence and include the publication date and page number in parentheses within the sentence or at the end of the sentence. As long as you have included the essential information, you can choose the option that works best for that particular sentence and source.
Following these guidelines, however, serves several important purposes. First, it signals to your readers that your paper should be taken seriously as a student’s contribution to a given academic or professional field
Depending on your field of study, you may sometimes write research papers that present extensive primary research, such as your own experiment or survey. In your abstract, summarize your research question and your findings, and briefly indicate how your study relates to prior research in the field.