2026-07-072026-07-07http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/66943We present a new and shorter proof of Stocking's result that any strongly irreducible Heegaard surface of a closed orientable triangulated 3-manifold is isotopic to an almost normal surface. We also re-prove a result of Jaco and Rubinstein on normal spheres. Both proofs are based on the "reduction" technique introduced by the author.13 pages, 2 figures. One figure added. The proof of a corollary was incorrect and had to be removed. The proof of the main result is essentially unchangedGeometric Topology57M99text