1. Refuse to read the previous literature published in your field
2. Take the lazy route and plagiarize
3. Omit key article components
4. Disrespect previous publications
5. Overestimate your contribution
6. Excel in ambiguity and inconsistency
7. Apply incorrect referencing of statements
8. Prefer subjective over objective statements
9. Give little care to grammar, spelling, figures and tables
10. Ignore editor and reviewer comments
Those who have never read those books in which bundles of deposit home will now understand me! I found an assistant site in my first year. And all the courses he helped me write essays customwritings and not just any topics. All teachers noted my talent for writing)
There's no class we ever took that was even roughly "Publishing 101". It was mostly word of mouth between grad students, and MAYbe profs, if one were so fortunate. The approach was basically "go do it, suck at it, hate yourself, get better, repeat". And I'm a native english speaker. I have so much respect for bilingual and English as a 2nd language folks working this trade. Yeah, good rules, though. The one thing I was warned about explicitly was #2, and not in the way most would think. I was warned that you can plagiarize yourself, like if you recycle an abstract that you and only you wrote that's going to be in or has already appeared in a journal or in another on-record (something with a doi) conference presentation, that sort of thing. It's not allowed, and not exactly intuitive, to me. You probably know this already. Regarding publishing and presentations, I'm in the "if I don't hate everything I've ever done, I'm not improving enough" school of thought. Luckily, though, I do hate it all, so far. It's going well! Not like I can complain on another three-musiical-instrument day, anyway. At a personal level, all systems are go, it's dandy. But at a nation-state or global level, uh oh. Uhhhhhh oh.
I bet they never covered how to create a robust archive and indexing system for everything you write, either? And that leads to the self-plagiarism problem, too. If everything you write is properly documented and archived, then you have the tools you need to do the due diligence on your past writing. But how many college students even back up their computer? Much less keyword their documents. Or create indexes of their writing - both final papers and incomplete work - that they can use to find things later? We are smart monkeys, but without proper training, all our tools are glorified hammers.
Plagiarizing yourself is sticky. Technically when you publish an article, you sign away the copyright on the text, but you own the know-how/IP. So if you've not published in a peer review journal where the copyright is no longer yours, then you're free to recycle text, so long as you're not purporting something to be new that isn't. However, if you've signed away a copyright, then you cannot use the same text, even if you're writing a paper about some data you already published another paper about, any thus the data collection method wasn't similar, but literally the same. Still need to figure out a new way to write up the methods. At least, that's the way I understand the rules.
In theory, the lab reports were supposed to be writing training. In practice, I learned more co-authoring papers with more experienced folks than all of those could conceivably teach me. In writing, I think #9 leads to #6 when we're talking English. Often miss the ball writing descriptions under graphs, too. There's much more emphasis and dedicated effort on teaching us presentation, though. You can't defend a diploma without giving one, and we had proseminar and seminar on both levels training us in basics of stuff like voice projection, fighting stage fright, winning/keeping audience's engagement, making slides etc. And it was a lot of fun, too! To balance it, Patent/IP law was hell.