THL Toolbox > Essays > Checklist

Checklist for Preparing an Essay for THL or JIATS

Contributor(s): José Cabezón, Michael Cox, David Germano, Nathaniel Grove, Alison Melnick, Steven Weinberger.

This page provides a workflow checklist for scholars submitting essays to THL or JIATS for publication. We suggest printing it out before you begin to prepare your essay, and then checking off tasks as you complete them.

Before submitting your article:

1. Send your abstract, bio, and photo of yourself with the article.
2. Make sure all non-English words are entered correctly in the Glossary Table.
3. Make sure all English proper nouns that need to go in the Glossary Table have been entered in the Glossary Table.
4. Make sure all Tibetan words in the Glossary Table and in the essay itself are in THL Extended Wylie transliteration.
5. Make sure all Word Styles have been applied for English words emphasized in bold and italic, indented citations, numbered and bulleted lists, and so forth.
6. Make sure the formatting of all bibliographic citations in the notes and bibliography conform to THL standards (see documentation for details).
7. Make sure the canonical texts have complete references, including citations of the catalogue name and volume number.
8. Change single quotes to double quotes, unless it’s a quote within a quote.
9. Make sure all quotes (single and double) are smart quotes. Make sure single quote that represents the a chung in Wylie is a close single quote (’ = apostrophe) and not an open single quote (‘).
10. Change double dash to en dash (make sure there is a space both before and after the en dash), except for hyphens.
11. In the Bibliography, use a 3em dash (that is, three consecutive em dashes) for repeat author entry (do not use multiple single dashes or underscores).
12. For passages in Tibetan, Sanskrit, Mongolian, Chinese, or other non-English languages, enter the translation in the body of the essay itself and place the original language passage in a footnote/endnote. Apply the appropriate Word style (such as Lang Tibetan, tib) to the passage.
13. All punctuation, including periods and commas, always goes inside a close quotation mark. The only exceptions are: semi-colon ( ; ), colon ( : ), and en dash (–).
14. Footnote/endnote numbers always follow all punctuation marks (including colons), except for the en dash (–), which the footnote/endnote number precedes.
15. Make sure that all numbers (page ranges, date spans, and so forth) conform to THL conventions.
16. Apply proper formatting for headers.
17. Provide a caption for each image, table, chart, or video clip. This is especially important because the markup for these media will be added after XML conversion.
18. Make sure there are no extra carriage returns (created by hitting the “enter” key) in the essay, and in particular between paragraphs. These will create huge unwanted spaces between paragraphs when the article is posted online.
19. If you have questions, refer to articles in previous issues of JIATS for examples; if this does not answer your question, email the editors.

Glossary Table Checklist

1. Make sure single quote that represents the a chung in Wylie is a close single quote (’= apostrophe) and not an open single quote (‘).
2. Remove any English-language pluralizers and possessives from the Glossary Table. For example, if the author refers to “thu’u bkwan’s Crystal Mirror,” make sure that in the Glossary Table the name appears as “thu’u bkwan” and not “thu’u bkwan’s”. In the essay itself it should read “thu’u bkwan’s”.
3. Capitalize English translations of proper nouns (text titles, names of temples, and so forth). Example: the translation of lha sa gtsug lag khang in the Glossary Table is Central Temple of Lhasa.
4. Make sure you create entries in the Glossary Table for the components of bibliographic citations: author, title, place of publication, publisher, editor, journal title, and so forth.

Provided for unrestricted use by the Tibetan and Himalayan Library