Short story checklist

It's a little frustrating that I seem to be making the same writing mistakes over and over again.

As someone who does computer work, the obvious solution to repeating the same mistakes is to make a checklist (of course, then you turn the checklist into a shell script and make your life infinitely easier -- when I figure out how to write a script to write short stories, I'll tell you)

So, here is a checklist of things that must be dealt with in order for a short story to be good. I'll adjust this as I learn more. The list is mainly for my own purposes, but hopefully others will find it useful, and maybe even contribute some thoughts:

1. Why should the reader care about this story, the characters, the places, or the events? Anything in the story that doesn't have an answer to this question should probably be cut.
2. If you think you're being cleverly subtle, you're probably being too vague for the reader. Make sure to be more clear than you think you need to be. Think about the ending of The Sixth Sense.
3. What is the purpose of the story? Will the reader understand the purpose?
4. Run the thing through the grammar analyzer.
5. There are five senses, write about all of them.
6. Write at least one unique quality about each major character.
7. Read the story out loud. A lot of awkward phrasing is exposed this way.