re "scare them" -- Perhaps deleting "If you don't, and your sample code throws errors or warnings, NodeReaper (or some solicitous Monasterian) will throw that in your face."

That would make the para start like this:

Use strict and warnings. Failure to use strict and warnings is a red flag; it tells us ...."

Personally, though, I think the explanation re XP doesn't quite fit here and might instead be an estimable addition to Voting/Experience System or The Role of XP in PerlMonks.

That's largely because I took the liberty of asking a non_Monk, non-programmer (aka SWMBO, who does happen to be a very good editor) to read a very early outline, and got the observation (even then) that it looked pretty long. I thought about adopting the "Chapter 1, Chapter 2..." approach I used in Markup in the Monastery -- where Chapter 1 is a really pithy (or "too truncated" depending on your view) summary of the really crucial points but didn't do so for a whole host of reasons (one of which might be laziness).