In addition to my own research, I am an academic reference librarian. I'm trying to help a master's-level student with a problem I've never seen in many, many years of doing word processing. Our library has an MS Word template with several styles built in to help students with basic formatting.

This student went crazy with subheadings. Everything a subheading practically. I've suggested that she undoes that because the TOC is six pages long for 15-page paper! However, the paper has a problem that I have not been able to fix no matter how much experimenting I do. There are several subheadings in the paper. The paragraph after the subhead is being treated as a subhead and put into the TOC. I've tried deleting text until the first word of the paragraph is right next to the end of the subhead and pressed enter. Then, I selected the entire paragraph and assigned it "normal" style for text.

Alas, it still shows up in the TOC after I have updated the whole document to fix the TOC. I don't want to undo all the formatting for the paper. It is good work and I don't want to penalize the student for creating a situation I can't fix. The paragraphs after the subheadings also have the subheading style. I can copy and paste the whole paper to plain text but that would create a huge amount of work for the student (or me ) to do. Any suggestions? Thanks.


Ken