The Table of Contents

Just as you skim and scan for information in everyday life by looking things up on the Internet, in manuals, and in cookbooks, you skim and scan for information for your college courses. The table of contents is especially useful for finding information. It can give you a sense of the book’s contents and its range and depth of coverage. You can look at the table of contents to determine whether a book will be useful, such as when you are researching a paper or a project.

A table of contents is located at the beginning of the book, and it lists the titles of a book’s chapters. Most textbooks also list chapter headings, subheadings, and other elements of the book. Many textbooks even have multiple tables of contents: brief ones, quick reference ones, and ones that include only maps, graphs, or other illustrations.

The main or full table of contents provides an overview of the topics each chapter covers. The headings and subheadings identify more specifically each chapter’s contents. One way you can make the headings in a table of contents work for you is to have some questions in mind when you look at them. You can then decide which chapters and sections are likely to help answer your questions.