you. Instead its role is to help your planning and your orien-
tation thinking by displaying a synoptic view of how your
thesis is organized down to your lowest order of headings and
sections. Some authors find it helpful for their extended con-
tents page to include headings and subheads and any number-
ing used, in the same font and layout as they are shown in
the chapters, which may spread the material out over several
A4 sheets. Others like to use a more condensed format for the
extended contents page, showing differences of emphasis, but
in more compressed ways. By keeping the extended contents
page on at most a couple of sheets of paper this approach may
give an easier overview of the structure of your material.
Devising headings and subheadings
The best way to inform your reader is to tell them
what they are likely to want to know – no more
and no less.
Robert J. Sternberg^4Good headings should accurately characterize your text. In a
very few words they should give readers a helpful advance
idea of what is to come in each section or subsection, and wher-
ever possible what your substantive argument will be. Devising
effective headings is a difficult art that needs sustained atten-
tion from authors. You can tell that the task is complex because
in the business world there are highly paid professionals who
do nothing else, people like advertising copywriters, newspaper
or magazine sub-editors, and Web-site designers. Intellectuals
tend to make fun of many of these groups and to see their
outputs as non-serious. But the job they do is not as easy as it
looks.
Consider the following problem. It is 1989 and the
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia has renounced its previous
‘leading role in the organs of the state’, bringing to an end over
40 years of one-party rule and state socialism, and opening the
way for democratization and a transition to a capitalist econ-
omy. You are working as a sub-editor for a right-wing British
tabloid newspaper, the Sun, whose daily audience of 4.3 million
84 ◆AUTHORING A PHD