The introduction also establishes the center and periphery of your thesis, a distinction that is very important, and not only for methodological reasons. Your committee will expect you to be significantly more comprehensive on what you have defined as the center than on what you have defined as the periphery. If, in a thesis on the partisan war in Monferrato, you establish that the center is the movements of the badogliane formations, the committee will forgive a few inaccuracies or approximations with regard to the garibaldine brigades, but will require complete information on the Franchi and Mauri formations.2 To determine the center of your thesis, you must make some decisions regarding the material that is available to you. You can do this during the bibliographical research process described in chapter 3, before you compose your work plan in the manner described at the beginning of this chapter.
By what logic should we construct our hypothetical table of contents? The choice depends on the type of thesis. In a historical thesis, you could have a chronological plan (for example, “The Persecutions of Waldensians in Italy”), or a cause and effect plan (for example, “The Causes of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”). You could also choose a spatial plan (“The Distribution of Circulating Libraries in the Canavese Geographical Region”) or a comparativecontrastive plan (“Nationalism and Populism in Italian Literature in the Great War Period”). In an experimental thesis you could have an inductive plan, in which you would move from particular evidence to the proposal of a theory. A logical-mathematical thesis might require a deductive plan, beginning with the theory’s proposal, and moving on to its possible applications to concrete examples. I would argue that the critical literature on your topic can offer you good examples of work plans, provided you use it critically, that is, by comparing the various approaches to find the example that best corresponds to the needs of your research question.
The table of contents already establishes the logical subdivision of the thesis into chapters, sections, and subsections. On the modalities of this subdivision see section 6.4. Here too, a good binary subdivision allows you to make additions without significantly altering the original order. For example:
1 Central Question
1.1 Subquestions
1.1.1 Principal Subquestion
1.1.2 Secondary Subquestion
1.2 Development of the Central Question
1.2.1 First Ramification
1.2.2 Second Ramification
You can also represent this structure as a tree diagram with lines that indicate successive ramifications, and that you may introduce without disturbing the work’s general organization:
Table 4.1
Once you have arranged the table of contents, you must make sure to always correlate its various points to your index cards and any other documentation you are using. These correlations must be clear from the beginning, and clearly displayed through abbreviations and/or colors, so that they can help you organize your cross-references. You have already seen examples of crossreferences in this book. Often the author speaks of something that has already been treated in a previous chapter, and he refers, in parentheses, to the number of the chapter, section, or subsection. These cross-references avoid unnecessary repetition, and also demonstrate the cohesion of the work as a whole. A crossreference can signify that the same concept is valid from two different points of view, that the same example demonstrates two different arguments, that what has been said in a general sense is also applicable to a specific point in the same study, and so on.
A well-organized thesis should abound in crossreferences. If there are none, it means that every chapter proceeds on its own, as if everything that has been said in the previous chapters no longer matters. There are undoubtedly thesis types (for example collections of documents) that can work this way, but cross-references should become necessary at least in their conclusions. A well-written hypothetical table of contents is the numerical grid that allows you to create cross-references, instead of needlessly shuffling through papers and notes to locate a specific topic. This is how I have written the very book you are reading.
So as to mirror the logical structure of the thesis (topic, center and periphery, ramifications, etc.), the table of contents must be articulated in chapters, sections, and subsections. To avoid long explanations, I suggest that you take a look at this book’s table of contents. This book is rich in sections and subsections, and sometimes even more minute subdivisions not included in the table of contents. (For example, see section 3.2.3. These smaller subdivisions help the reader understand the argument.) The example below illustrates how a table of contents should mirror the logical structure of the thesis. If a section 1.2.1 develops as a corollary to 1.2, this must be graphically represented in the table of contents:
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 The Subdivision of the Text
1.1 The Chapters
1.1.1 Spacing
1.1.2 Indentation
1.2 The Sections
1.2.1 Different Kinds of Titles
1.2.2 Possible Subdivision in Subsections2 The Final Draft
2.1 Typing Agency or Typing on Your Own
2.2 The Cost of a Typewriter
3 The Bookbinding
This example also illustrates that the different chapters need not necessarily adhere to the same pattern of subdivision. The nature of the argument may require that one chapter be divided into many sub-subsections, while another can proceed swiftly and continuously under a general title.
A thesis may not require many divisions. Also, subdivisions that are too minute may interrupt the continuity of the argument. (Think, for example, of a biography.) But keep in mind that a detailed subdivision helps to control the subject, and allows readers to follow your argument. For example, if I see that an observation appears under subsection 1.2.2, I know immediately that it is something that refers to section 2 of chapter 1, and that it has the same importance as the observation under subsection 1.2.1.
One last observation: only after you have composed a solid table of contents may you allow yourself to begin writing other parts of your thesis, and at this point you are not required to start with the first chapter. In fact, usually a student begins to draft the part of his thesis about which he feels most confident, and for which he has gathered the best documentation. But he can do this only if, in the background, there is the table of contents providing a working hypothesis.
4.2 Index Cards and Notes
4.2.1 Various Types of Index Cards and Their Purpose
Begin to read the material as your bibliography grows. It is unrealistic to think that you will compile a complete bibliography before you actually begin to read. In practice, after putting together a preliminary list of titles, you can immerse yourself in these. Sometimes, before a student even starts a bibliography, he begins by reading a single book, and from its citations he begins to compile a bibliography. In any case, as you read books and articles, the references thicken, and the bibliography file that we have described in chapter 3 grows bigger.
Ideally, when you begin writing your thesis, you would have all the necessary books at home, both new and antique (and you would have a personal library, and a comfortable and spacious working environment where you can divide the books that you will be using into different piles, arranged on many tables). But this ideal condition is very rare, even for a professional scholar. In any case, let us imagine that you have been able to locate and purchase all the books that you need. In principle, the only index cards you will need at this point are the bibliographical cards I have described in section 3.2.2. You will prepare your work plan (i.e., the title, introduction, and table of contents) with your chapters and sections numbered progressively, and as you read the books you will underline them, and you will write in the margins the abbreviations of your table of contents’ various chapters. Similarly, you will place a book’s abbreviation and the page number near the chapters in your table of contents, so that you will know where to look for an idea or quote when the time comes for writing.
Let us look at a specific example. Suppose you write a thesis on “The Concept of Possible Worlds in American Science Fiction,” and that subsection 4.5.6 of your plan is “The Time Warp as a Gateway to Possible Worlds.” As you read chapter 21, page 132 of Robert Sheckley’s Mindswap (New York: Delacorte Press, 1966), you will learn that Marvin’s Uncle Max “stumbled into a time warp” while playing golf at the Fairhaven Country Club in Stanhope, and found himself transferred to the planet Celsus V. You will write the following in the margin:
T. (4.5.6) time warp
This note refers to a specific subsection of your thesis (you may in fact use the same book ten years later and take notes for another project, so it is a good idea to know to what project a note refers). Similarly, you will write the following in subsection 4.5.6 of your work plan:
cf. Scheckley, Mindswap, 132
In this area, you will already have noted references to Fredric Brown’s What Mad Universe and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Door into Summer.
However, this process makes a few assumptions: (a) that you have the book at home, (b) that you own it and therefore can underline it, and (c) that you have already formulated the work plan in
