You wouldn’t show up at a job interview in your PJs, with 5 o’clock shadow and halitosis, would you? Of course not. Likewise, you shouldn’t show up on ficlets.com with bad spelling, punctuation, or grammar.

I recognize that some of you are secondary school students, or dyslexic, so I’ll cut you some slack in this regard. But for the rest of you, there is no excuse for bad spelling now that web browsers like Firefox and Safari include a built-in spellchecker. It won’t catch homonyms like “to” versus “too,” or misspellings that are also words, but it will catch most other things.

Punctuation and grammar are trickier issues, since you can’t check for those in the web browser. (Although you could paste your ficlet into MS Word.) You’ll just have to learn the rules.

There are books out there that can help. For punctuation, I suggest Eats, Shoots and Leaves. If you’re still in school, take more writing classes.

These are skills you don’t need just for ficlets; they will serve you well the rest of your life!