As for Iris’ vs. Iris’s…I’ll go with either (I forget which I settled on for “Waking Iris,” in fact, just so long as the author will stay consistent.

I should say that I have found the AP Stylebook or Strunk & White to be less that helpful. While they give good pointers, different books also seem to disagree on some basic rules. For example, is “Iris’s book” or “Iris’ book” the correct way to spell it? The correct answer is that both are right, although the different grammar books will swear by one or the other. It simply depends, in the case of fiction, of how you want it to be pronounced.

That said, if you need a friend abroad to loan those pesky stylebooks too, I am your postal address! *grins*

Oh, and as a random Saucy Wenches aside, Tami is not the only one to think Anathema is a cool female name. In fact, in Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (both utterly brilliant writers, by the way), there is a character named Anathema Device. Her mom simply picked her name thinking it sounded cool, and missed to check the meaning…
.-= Iris´s latest blog post is Meet The Demoness (Artwork!) =-.

If you listened to the podcast, you may have heard Tami allude to the point you bring up. As for how the individual author wants to proceed, that’s a personal choice. Obviously, I’ve presented mine. In my judgment, a lot of those mechanical things are relatively quick and easy (at least through the initial spell-check), and it gives you a chance to “get away” from the story for a bit.

In professional publishing, once a manuscript is accepted for publication, an editor looks at the document, then a copy editor. Once the galley proofs are completed, a proofreader gets involved. Of course, after each of these steps, the author gets the document back to accept, reject, or negotiate the suggested changes.

Deanna Hoak discusses this point in much more detail than I can here (and since she is a professional copyeditor, I’ll defer to her expertise every time). There are a couple links to her blog in the Resources section, under Writing in the nav menu.

However, I do feel I have to defend the courts, as per point 1 in your footnotes. While the US courts may still be using courier fonts, the courts in the UK, as well as the European Court of Justice, do use more “contemporary” fonts in their court summaries and reports. It’s nitpicking I know, but I just couldn’t resist

On another note, is there a reason you do the spellchecking and detailed search/replace before the flow and causality revision? I might be missing something of course, but it just appears to create work that might potentially be undone. Granted, it does make for an easier read that’s less likely to make your eyes bleed.
.-= Kihara´s latest blog post is 3.3 this week =-.

Yay points

By the way, how do you spell-check and edit your blog posts? Do you use some WordPress plugin or just write them in Word and do the hard work there?
.-= Saithir´s latest blog post is Trial of the Grand Crusader Tips and Tricks, Part 2 =-.

And technically, it’s “Dragonriders of Pern” but here you go:

.S.U.P.E.R.C.O.O.L.

(Count ‘em: 10 points!)

And F’lar is obviously from the Dragons of Pern series, where do I collect my super cool points?
.-= Saithir´s latest blog post is Trial of the Grand Crusader Tips and Tricks, Part 2 =-.