As someone who's also done some writing, this is all Extremely Sound Advice. :->
Here are a couple of point enhancements, and a rant about how a famous production torpedoed itself - IMO, anyway - by getting fixated on one of them
(2) Head-hopping / POV change - think screen format and a change of camera angle. A "dinkus" (one or more asterisks, bullets or other symbol) between paragraphs is enough to indicate this, and you're good to go.
I do something similar in my own posts, including this one, though properly speaking the asterisks would be centred. I've done that with the next set, though since I've done the centring by inserting spaces, they may be well off-centre in other themes:
(3) and (4) Treat info- and expo-dumps like pungent seasoning. Your recipe (story) needs them, but Not All In A Lump.
A good way to do this (the equivalent to "stir in gradually") is to combine them with other action - eating a meal, a walk-and-talk, watching some non-essential business like someone grooming a horse, washing a car, mowing a lawn etc., etc.
Intersperse the necessary dialogue of the info-expo with descriptions of and comments on the other business. If that business can be made relevant to the info-expo (comparisons, side-comments etc.) so much the better, but the point is to break up what can too easily be what TVTropes calls A Wall Of Text.
Thriller-writer Philip Kerr's later books are notorious for this: there are numerous instances where a character starts to talk ("Open Quotes") at the top of one page and - without interruption and sometimes even without paragraphs - doesn't finish ("Close Quotes") until halfway down the next.
Worse, the character is often reciting a chunk of background information from Kerr's research files which should have stayed there, or at the very least been pared down to its bare essentials as something a human being might say during a conversation with another human being.
Which Does Not Happen. :-P
(8) about epithets, tackles something well-enough known that it has a TV Trope, "Burly Detective Syndrome". This has a cousin, "Said-Bookism", and no matter what you might have heard or indeed seen posted along with lists of sometimes-ridiculous alternatives on Tumblr, "said" is not dead.
It's alive, it's well and it's doing its job, which is to be the unobtrusive hook from which dialogue is hung. As I've said more than once, if a hook attracts more attention than the thing it's holding up, something's gone wrong.
(10) If there's a scene that's likely to be fun to write, and another that's likely to be a slog, then if it works for your writing habits try to swap to and fro between the writing of them, with fun as a reward for slog.
If chop-and-change writing like this throws you off, then write the slog first and the fun after since once again, that's the reward, something to look forward to. Doing it the other way means you're looking at the slog to come, and that's not my idea of a reward.
Also, it can happen (personal experience) that after the refreshment of the fun, you'll come back to the first-draft slog bit and revise it into something better.
I'd suggest (6) and (7) about subverting expectations - whether characters' or readers', and the one will become the other as reading happens - are something that need approached with care, and should always have a solid reason beyond (box tick) Not What They Expect.
Showing an unsubverted episode or incident - for instance the character's going-out preparations, or their commuting-home routine - is necessary, often more than once *, to establish Normality, so the character and reader are aware that This Time Is Different.
(* I've seen this done by cut-and-paste repeating the same description from one chapter into the next. It was imaginative and effective there, but could easily have tripped up on its own cleverness by seeming UNimaginative. YMMV.)
Why is the character including a concealed weapon in their party dress-up? Why is the character concerned they might be tailed during that commute? A comparison between ordinary and extraordinary is needed to show this doesn't happen every single time.
It's also a good way of racking up page-turning tension before invoking (5) that cliff-hanger chapter ending... :->
Subverting expectations as a (box tick) action because it was So Effective That One Time is what transformed the final seasons of a once-popular fantasy adaptation into such a disappointment.
"Game of Thrones" is an excellent example of subverted expectations, such as the Red Wedding where - despite the way heroes are expected to escape at the last minute - a crapsack world like Westeros means bad things play all the way through to their bad conclusion.
It's also an excellent example of how bad writing and a (box tick) attitude can lead to subversions that should have been left alone.
One instance is the way Jaime Lannister's redemption was abandoned "to subvert expectations" (box tick) complete with redemption-dismissive dialogue that was a slap in the face to several seasons of character development.
The lack of any hint or implication that such a thing was even possible suggests - to this viewer anyway - that it was no more than a (box tick) without additional thought as to whether it was logical in-story, as long as it generated yet another "Oh No, we didn't see that coming!" reaction from the audience.
(Of course nobody saw it coming, since neither plot requirement nor character development had any reason for it to happen.)
Sometimes a story should play out logically as a story because It's A Story, Not A Documentary. Terry Pratchett knew this and called it Narrativium, the element which drives stories. TV Tropes calls it The Theory of Narrative Causality.
Whatever the name, and however storytellers may tinker and tweak with it, they ignore its basic rules at their peril.
Another example is Cersei's death.
When a writer as amiable as C.S. Lewis said:
"Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end..."
...just dropping a building on her without involving any of the many other High-Profile Characters she'd hurt throughout the series was ridiculous, especially with one of those High-Profile Characters already in the vicinity.
It may well have subverted expectations, but it was a lousy resolution.
It was also bad storytelling which abandoned at least one long-anticipated set-up (all too common in later GoT), and still vexes me since in a storyline filled with subversions for the sake of shock value, NOT subverting audience expectations but instead rewarding them with what they want (what they really, really want) becomes a subversion in itself.
It's not hard to imagine more original and entertaining ways of bringing Cersei's pigeons home to roost, the most obvious being a fatal encounter with Arya-reFaced-as-Jaime.
This IMO would have been a much more satisfying use of her well-established Faceless Man sneakmurder skills than that no-setup leap from nowhere onto the Ice King, another Bad Guy built up to deserve a more spectacular termination than his you're-done-now-kthxbye demise.
Certainly after eight seasons of scheming, murder, cruelty - and infuriating smugness, oh yes, that too - having Cersei "soundly killed" should have involved something, anything, more conclusive, up-front and personal than a load of bricks landing on her head.
Subvert, yes. But not just for the sake of doing it.
And as @writeblrfantasy concluded, no matter what way you're doing it, have fun in the doing of it...
