Guidelines for Contributors

The Chinese Text Sampler is a constantly expanding resource, and new contributions of appropriate Chinese text materials are always welcome. Potential contributors should carefully follow the following guidelines.

Text Selection Criteria:

• The Chinese Text Sampler is intended to be a high-quality cultural resource. Texts to be included in the sampler, then, should have genuine literary, historical, linguistic, or other cultural significance. They should be widely known among people living in China, and their study should make a tangible contribution to the foreign student's cultural literacy. They should be the kinds of texts, in other words, that a foreign student living in China would be expected to have read or at least heard of.
• The Chinese Text Sampler is intended primarily as a resource for students of the Chinese language. Therefore, the text selections it contains should be reasonably accessible to students in their second to fourth years of study. Texts with a high percentage of rare or obscure words or usages should be avoided, as well as those whose comprehension requires specialized knowledge of the classical or literary tradition.
• As a text sampler, this resource is intended to give students an initial taste of a wide variety of reading materials. Individual documents, then, should be no more than a typical book chapter in length, and they may be much shorter.
  

Text Formatting Guidelines:

• Every text file should begin with a header. The header should be left justified and separated from the body of the text by a single blank line. The header consists of two or three lines containing the following information:
  • The first line of the header should give the title of the text.
  • If the text is a selection from a longer work, the next line should give the name and/or number of the chapter or section.
  • The final line of the header should indicate the author's name.
• The body of the text should contain no fixed line breaks or other formatting codes.
• Each paragraph should begin with a single TAB character. There should be no blank lines between paragraphs.
• Every text file should end with a footer. The footer should be left justified, and should be separated from the body of the text by a single blank line. If the text is taken from a printed work, the footer should provide, in standard bibliographic form, the complete citation for the work. If it is taken from a website, the footer should give the complete URL of the source website.
• Texts should be thoroughly proofread prior to submission.
• Texts should be saved as GB text files or as plain Chinese TXT files.

Text Submission Guidelines:

• Completed exts should be submitted as email attachments to dporter@umich.edu. The email accompanying the text should include the English title of the text, along with a brief description of the text to be included on the Sampler web page.