Some teachers are very fond of accuracy, so often reduce the grade only because of blots in the design. One of the problematic places in the design is the table of contents. Table of contents and title page – this is the first thing that sees the person who took the work in hand.

Table of Contents or Coursework Content

Many students confuse these two concepts. Therefore, in order to avoid unnecessary blots, one should know what the differences are in order to correctly write the coursework.

Definition 1

The content is when the sections in the work are not related to each other (for example, in the collection of tasks). Table of Contents – when the chapters relate to one another.

Thus, it is clear that in the course you need to write “Table of Contents.”

Example 1

However, there are coursework consisting of different parts (for example, in accounting, the teacher can offer to prepare answers to several theoretical questions and solve a cross-cutting problem for a fictional enterprise) – then the content of the coursework is required.

The table of contents includes a list of all sections of the course work with the indication of the pages, starting with the introduction.

How to make content in the course work

Here are some general tips on how to arrange the content in the coursework:

The table of contents should be located on the second page immediately after the title page.

Example 2

Sometimes teachers need to make a summary of course work – a kind of brief description containing some formal information. In this case, the table of contents is moved to the third page.

• The answer to the question that includes the content of the course work is unequivocal: introduction, chapters and paragraphs of the main part, conclusion, list of references and applications. Table of contents in the course work should not include other elements, for example, the title page and abstract.
• Chapter titles should be a complete thought. Before you make a table of contents in the course work, you should make sure that the titles of chapters and paragraphs are declarative sentences. Interrogative sentences in headlines are more typical of a journalistic, not a scientific style.

Example 3

Examples of the names of paragraphs in the content of the course work: “The concept of monetary policy” (and not “What is monetary policy?”), “Types of monetary policy” (and not “What is the monetary policy?”).

The table of contents should reflect the whole concept of the course, its entire plan.

• After the names of the sections do not put a point. This is provided for by the requirements for formatting the contents of the coursework (in the same way as the full stop is not put after the heading placed in the text of the work).
• Correct coursework provides for alignment of text on the pattern: the names of the elements – on the left (it is possible to indent to reflect the structure – headings of the second level with greater indentation than the headings of the first level), and page names – on the right.
• There are controversial issues in how to arrange the table of contents of the course work.

Example 4

Some universities require the use of a placeholder (usually dots) between the name of the structural element and the page number for ease of reading the table of contents, others insist that the place should remain empty.

Registration of automatically collected table of contents of course work

By the way the content of the course looks like, one can draw conclusions about the level of ownership of its author by a text editor.

The developers of popular text editors — MS Word, OpenOffice.Org Writer and the like — have figured out how to arrange the coursework with minimal effort. But not only students, but teachers also do not always know about these opportunities, and continue to carry out the design of the content in the course manual.

The advantages of automatic table of contents:

• Titles of chapters and paragraphs will look exactly the same as in the text. The program will not make typos and errors when copying.
• There are no problems with alignment of titles on the left, and page numbers on the right. The lines of the beginning and end of the table of contents will be perfectly straight.
• Synchronized text and table of contents. If you made changes to the name of the element, or it moved to another page – this will be reflected in the corresponding change in the table of contents. The correctness of the page numbers is checked by the program.

Therefore, deciding how to make a table of contents in the course, give preference to the use of automated tools.

How to make out the coursework in MS Word

In order to make an automatically collected table of contents in the course work, preliminary work should be carried out. The easiest way to do this is at the stage of writing the text, but if you forget about it, you can later.

In order for the text editor to understand which parts of the text are headings (used in the table of contents), it is necessary to define text styles. In MS Word there are standard heading styles – Heading 1, Heading 2 – but they do not meet the usual requirements for coursework (bold, italic, color). You can change these styles to the requirements of the university or create your own heading styles.

When the desired style is set for all headings, it remains to go to the Links tab and select the Table of Contents tool.

You can choose the proposed template for auto-assembled table of contents or set your own parameters – a list of the levels of headings included in the table of contents, font of the text of the table of contents, indentation, placeholder, and some others.