Talk:Sorceress's island

Grammar

Currently, most recent editions of Manuals of Style would say that "Sorceress's island" is correct, not "Sorceress' island", although AP might be a bit iffy given whether you consider "Sorceress" a proper noun or not. This however is a relatively recent change to grammar conventions that might be too entrenched to meaningfully enforce. But I wanted to bring it up just in case. Lacrossedeamon (talk) 03:40, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

May I ask what manual of style's say this exactly and where? As someone who usually has to check grammar quite routinely and also has seen many manual of styles before what you are saying flies in the face of virtually everything. The use of the apostrophe after an s is well covered and goes back to the history of the letters it is replacing.--Debarra (talk) 03:45, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Chicago Style says use 's for all singular nouns, common or proper, regardless of if the noun itself end in an s or not. MLA and APA are similar. AP is slightly different as it states it can be either or if the singular noun is a proper name but that singular common nouns get an 's regardless of ending in s or not (in this instance I'm not sure Sorceress counts as a proper name or not). Lacrossedeamon (talk) 04:20, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

May I ask where exactly these style guides state as such? Because I have at one stage or another used the styles you mention here and in every case it was needed only to add an apostrophe in a situation such as this. Having tried to briefly check around online about these guides as well I could not find anything stating as you are.--Debarra (talk) 12:15, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia's own Manual of Style calls for what Lacrossedeamon is describing here, as does the Chicago Manual of Style (§ 7.16 et seq.); indeed § 7.22 calls the standard you are describing an "alternative practice" that, while "formerly more common," is "not recommended." When we had a discussion about this a couple years ago, one of Brandon's beta/gamma readers indicated this is also the style used by Peter Ahlstrom, and it's what we ultimately decided to use as well. --Stargazer (talk) 19:09, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Honestly that’s what I should have checked first: the convention used in the book itself. It does happen to be “Sorceress’s”. Lacrossedeamon (talk) 19:24, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for linking to the exact place for these references.

In the case of this being a site wide policy then the page should be moved, however I double checked the "Guides and Policies" tab and could not see any reference of this rule there under the Style Guide page. I personally could not find any mention of this there. If this is in fact a rule of the site then it should be added there as otherwise there is no way for an editor to know this.--Debarra (talk) 19:35, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I will freely admit we aren't always the best at updating the help pages; I've added this to Help:Style --Stargazer (talk) 20:30, 7 January 2023 (UTC)