Ranma looked about the living room. He saw his father
speaking and laughing with Soun Tendo, an old family friend.
He saw his fianc�e Akane Tendo, Soun's youngest daughter,

fiancee, Akane

(The accented e will show up as a blob on other platforms, so it's a
good idea to stick to the standard character. Since "Akane Tendo" is
identifying who "his fiancee" refers to, and doesn't have a "who was" or
similar connector, you need a comma setting it off. Though you can
probably just drop everything between "fiancee" and "cheerfully" since
we all know who Akane is.)

Actually, in this case, "He saw his fiancee Akane Tendo, Soun's youngest daughter," is more correct than "fiancee, Akane Tendo." It's a question of restrictive vs. non-restrictive identifiers. If it has a comma, it's restrictive, and if there's no comma, it's non-restrictive. The comma restricts Ranma to having only one fiancee, while having no comma indicates that there is more than one fiancee. Nodoka could say "My son, Ranma, is a martial artist," and Soun would say "My daughter Akane [says she] is a martial artist," since Nodoka only has one son, while Soun has multiple daughters.

Usually you would have a comma after "fiancee" when followed by the name, but Ranma's situation necessitates the exception.

As for the high-ascii characters getting messed up on my Macintosh, sometimes they're translated correctly by the email program, and sometimes not. In this case they were. I always have to do find-and-replaces, though, on plain-text files where the author used "smart" quotes.

Ignoring Ukyou, Shampoo said to Ranma, "Ooh! Shampoo is
thirsty. Let's go get something to drink, okay?" She lead him
to the refreshments table. "Fruit Punch!" she quealed.

squealed (I think you meant)

Nope, it was quealed all the way. After all, it's also a perfectly cromulent word. ^_^

Also, "she led him," not "lead." Since both words can be pronounced the same, this is a harder one to catch...

I apologize if my comments appear too nit-picky. Maybe someone will find them helpful. ^_^;;;

Peter

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