Griping Over The Shinning Sun

On occasion I review manuscripts for other writers either because they asked me or because it's part of a workshop that I happen to be doing at the time. It's the latter that has me a little peaved this morning. Now I know that spelling mistakes are common. You can either have completely misspelled words that are picked up by your spell checker or on occasion you spell something wrong but because the error is actually a word the spell checker doesn't detect it. Sometimes I can overlook these errors because I know the writer is working on the first draft and probably raced through getting the particular scenes on paper. Don't get me wrong, I know I probably make the same mistakes often. What gets me though, is that the writer doesn't spell it incorrectly just once. It's repeatedly the same error which leads me to believe they just don't know how to spell the word. The biggest ones I have come across lately are griping instead of gripping. It's only one extra p needed but over and over, the p is forgotten. I don't know that there is a solution to the problem. If the spell checker doesn't get it and it's actually a word, I guess in the long run hopefully an editor or copyeditor will pick it up.

Another one that really bugs me is shinning instead of shining. Shinning means to run or walk briskly, shining, well we know what shining means. When it's written that the sun is shinning, I have this mental picture of the sun racing across the sky like in movies when they're trying to show the quick transition between day and night, or even on the weather channel when they show the time lapse weather conditions. 9 times out of 10, I have never seen someone actually mean the sun is shinning.

Just one of my little pet peeves. And feel free, in the future to pick up on any of my mistakes that come through on my blog posts or if you happen to be reading bits of my manuscript, please, don't hold back.