Submissions

Author Guidelines

Documents:

All submissions should be in Microsoft Word file format. Formatting for fonts, line spacing, and the placement of text on the page will be finalized by the typesetters.

Headings and subheadings:

To facilitate typesetting, authors must use Word's style function to label the title of their essay in "title" style, the titles of all subsections in "header 1" style, and all other text in "normal" style. See full instructions here.  

• Do not use "Introduction" or any other heading for the first section of your essay.
• Use subsections to demarcate major content areas in the body of the essay.
• Avoid anything below "header 1" headings. If sub-subsections are truly necessary, user "header 2." 

Notes and bibliography: 

• Follow standards for Chicago Manual's Notes and Bibliography style.
• Include citations in endnotes, not footnotes, numbered with Arabic numerals. Chicago's short form for notes is fine (including author's last name, title of work, and page number). Use Microsoft Word's automated endnotes functions for placement and numbering. Precede the list of endnotes with the heading Notes in "header 1" style.
• Provide full bibliographical information for all works cited in a list at the end of the document preceded by the heading References in "header 1" style. Format items in this list with a hanging first line.
• Use italics, not underlining, for titles.

Diacritics and language

At Samyak, we feel it is a better reflection of Jain communities today to seamlessly switch between English, Sanskrit, and various Prakrits, as well as contemporary spoken languages of India. Toward that end, we are not italicizing non-English terms.

• Use IAST standards for diacritical marks for all Sanskrit terms and other transliterations from the Devanāgarī script (see resources here).
• We follow an author’s own preferences for colloquial or dialectical spellings. For example, we will accept anekāntavāda but also anekantvad or anekantwad. We ask authors to consider both consistency and communicability when deciding these details.
• We allow for pluralizing Sanskrit and other terms by adding an “s” (e.g., Tīrthaṅkaras).

Miscellaneous grammar and style:

In general, Samyak follows grammar, spelling, and punctuation standards for American-style English as specified in the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style.

• Use hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes appropriately. Use hyphens (-) for hyphenated words. Use en dashes to indicate page ranges or year ranges (1985–1989). Use em dashes to emphasize content in a sentence—like this.
• Spell out all numbers under 100 (e.g., ninety-nine, not 99).
• Periods go inside quotation marks at the end of a sentence “like this.” Colons and semicolons go outside “like this”; question marks and exclamation marks go outside the quote marks, unless they are part of the quotation itself.
• Avoid generalizations such as "Eastern" or "Western." Instead refer to specific traditions (e.g., Jaina epistemology or American pragmatism) whenever possible.