Based on a corpus of Austrian students' texts from three disciplines (personnel management, business psychology, economic history) analysed with Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), this paper investigates the macro-structural expectations which tables of content (ToCs) raise, the cues by which these expectations are triggered, and the "predictive quality" of ToCs. The ToCs in the personnel management group's texts offer the best "prediction" of the actual macrostructures,whereas in the other two groups ToC and textual macro-structures diverge from each other in various ways. The analysis also shows a