Thanks for the long comment! I’m not offended in the slightest – I guess we all have our different ways of saying things and different teachers have different viewpoints and different teaching methods. The guy who runs GAS (and my other clients) get exasperated sometimes when I do a double spacing after a full stop and one space after a comma – yet that is the way I was taught at school for approx. 12 years!

As my best friend here in Germany likes to say often – “even a native speaker can’t speak their language properly” – as in, everyone has their rules, their favourite slang words, their lazy shortcuts. We are all different – and that’s what makes the world interesting.

But don’t take my word for it if you don’t want to. Have a look at these:

First, I would highly recommend reading Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”. (If you live in London, I’ll meet you in a pub and let you take a gander at it, and might even let you borrow it, so long as you promise to return it.) It’s probably the best little book on modern punctuation ever. It’s also funny. Definitely worth every penny.

Second, consider downloading the Guardian’s free PDF on style, which you can get here: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2007/12/11/guardianstylebook2007.pdf
Specifically, have a look at page 22 on apostrophes. This is also a very handy guide if you’re ever in doubt about how something should be written. Just have a poke around and see how the plurals are written for numbers and acronyms.

Here’s a recent headline from the BBC website: “Malaysia MP quits over sex DVDs”. Link here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7167497.stm

If you’re a fan (or not) of Wikipedia, you could check out its Style Guide, which says:

“Plural and possessive forms
Acronyms and initialisms are pluralized by adding -s or -es as with any other nouns (They produced three CD-ROMs in the first year; The laptops were produced with three different BIOSes in 2006). As with other nouns, no apostrophe is used unless the form is a possessive.”

link to above: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Acronyms_and_abbreviations

Anyway, I used to work as a editor for a fiction magazine, and I also write fiction. The hardest thing we have to deal with is criticism from others about our own writing. It’s even harder when someone like me points it out in a public forum such as this. I’ve been there, believe me. I’ve had my work ripped to shreds again and again on several writing sites, and not just over style and punctuation. Moreover, we all mistakes — we are all far from perfect, which is why we have editors and copy writers and friends (and readers of geeky blogs) to point out the things we didn’t know or forgot. My earlier post wasn’t meant to be snarky or impolite, nor is this one.

PS: Mark, just a friendly style/punctuation note: you don’t need apostrophes to make plurals of DVD and CD — “DVDs” and “CDs” is proper. (The same goes for other acronyms and for numbers, e.g. 30s, 1920s, et al.)