How short is so short that no TOC is needed?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Mario wonders <<How short is so short that a TOC is not needed? I can pretty
well use my judgment, but wondered if there was some rule of thumb that
anyone knew about.>>

Unless space is crucially tight, there's little reason not to have a table
of contents in any report or manual much longer than 2 pages; in short, if
you have to flip pages to figure out what's in the document, the TOC is
useful to at least some readers. For the really short stuff, you can fit a
mini-TOC in the margin of the first page, as we do with one of our series of
FERIC reports. The nice thing about a TOC is that it provides an "at a
glance" overview of the document, and the effort involved in producing one
is minimal, particularly for smaller documents. So why not spend the time?

Mark Levinson's suggestion that the number and complexity of topics provides
a better measure of the need for a TOC than document length is right on the
money. For a typical paper in a science journal, a TOC is unnecessary
because the contents (abstract, introduction, materials and methods,
results, discussion/conclusions, literature cited) are so standardized that
adding a TOC tells readers nothing they don't already know. But for a
technical report (a monograph), the structure may be very different from
this approach, and the TOC now becomes necessary because readers have no
advance knowledge of what specific types of information you're presenting
and where to look for them.

You can't really apply the same rule to indexes, though. Indexes are
primarily useful for documents long enough that it's impractical to skim the
entire document looking for a specific topic. It's hard to justify an index
for a typical 8-page document, but once you start moving beyond 20 pages or
so (an entirely subjective number), the document's starting to get long
enough to make an index worthwhile.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"Quebits took the art of manual writing to such extremes [that] the first
human scholars who'd tried to decipher their written language had spent a
lifetime working through what they hoped would be a definitive piece of
Quebit culture. No one was quite ready to say it wasn't, but the huge
ancient text had proved to be a manual for installing a sewage system within
a city."--Julie Czerneda, "Changing Vision"

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