This, my friends, is probably the most important section of the guide. Disobeying basic writing rules can knock good stories down to mediocre, and makes mediocre stories unreadable. Very few things in the guide are written in stone, but if you're going to take any of this as gospel, it should be this section. These are writing rules. They are non-negotiable. If you don't use spell check, if you use punctuation wrong, and if you don't make the effort to change it, readers—reviewers on FFnet, teachers or professors, or anyone else—will either laugh at you or lie to you because they don't want to hurt your feelings.

You can have the best story ideas in the world, but if you can't communicate them, it won't matter.