During Nano, one shouldn't worry too much about the technicalities, but one must admit, some aspects of writing do demand a certain level of competence. Like keeping your tenses straight, having a consistent point-of-view (or at least applying the changing POVs in a consistent way), and writing dialogue without sounding like a thesaurus.
There are threads for the above (and more) all over the forums, and although I mostly skip through them, they are probably far more useful to the newbies. I'm at the point where I don't remember when I had to even struggle to understand these things. I suppose I've absorbed most of these lessons by simply reading.
Take dialogue for instance. Authors who are good at it make reading it effortless. You can picture the characters talking. And the characters aren't just blabbing--they have chemistry. So just from reading that, one can observe when to put speech tags, how long a lecture can go on without losing the reader, where to put in action with the dialogue. One can also get tips about dialogue by simply observing how people talk. People watching is one of my more amusing past times and it's amazing how some snippet of conversation or personal quirk can spark an idea.
Of course, you can't say that all good examples can be found in reading. Some books can be terrible even if the writing itself is technically brilliant. Maybe the plot has more holes than Swiss cheese. Or the characters are really stupid. More often than not, I find books that I hate have a style that grates on me like fingernails on chalkboard. It's the certain turn of phrase or a forced authorial interpretation that just seems terribly off.
Ah, but it's Nano. Who cares about spelling let alone style? Editing is for later.
