The very worst sin that a writer can commit is wasting the reader's time and attention. This sin can be committed by simply writing a bad story that goes nowhere or contains characters that in the end, the reader doesn't care about.
More commonly, this sin is committed by inattention to mechanical issues such as bad grammar, poor usage, misspellings and typos that make a reader work harder than she must, and, if bad enough, cause her to stop reading the story completely, abandoning the time that she already invested. (Easy writing is cursed hard reading!)
I have flubbed a major goal in re-posting some of my older stories. First, I used an less than adequate editing software and did not verify that I produced compliant ASCII text files (it did not.) Second, I blindly struggled with the SOL mechanism for updating a story and screwed up the posting. Unknowingly, I announced on my SOL blog that the story Steward's Third Mission was ready for readers. Several very kind people have re-read the story and noted these errors. I want to thank them more than I am able in this short space; and I want to apologize to them and everyone else who took the time to re-read the story and shrugged, wondering what kind of drugs did I take back in the 1960s that brought on early dementia.
Thanks to: UncleMerlin, Dinsdale, Quine, te987, adraken, nsn1955, davidl150, wires, joebee, Lion13, Desert Baseballer, zululook, inioth, atoner-90626, Gordon Johnson, CoullPert, and CoffeeMojo11.
Finally, a very humble thanks to Lazeez, Webmaster extraordinary.