Burroway shows plenty of good examples on short stories. One of the first she describes is a short narrative about standing in a room. The paragraphs about standing in the room reflect the way the room feels, narrow, long, and with rows and rows of ham (or words, ya know, same thing), while still guiding the reader through all 5 senses. This finally lets all that stuff we learned in poetry click properly. Poetry makes no sense to me, but short stories are my proverbial language. Another thing Burroway brings up is how some opinions and prejudices won't make sense to the reader if they don't share the opinions, and worse, could even deter the reader from reading further if they don't agree with the opinion. In Everything That Rises Must Converge,O'Connor touches on the matter of opinions that don't match, and I could understand if someone put down this story if they were particularly sensitive.
I also loved the way a series of short stories was used to explain different parts of writing. One is called Polaroids, comparing writing first drafts to film developing. The next, Character, is a story about how to develop characters. Plot continues in theme and describes plots through story, explaining that plots grow out of characters, not viceversa. Dialogue shows, through story, how to set up decent conversations that seem real enough to the reader.  I found this set of stories not only interesting, but also a very helpful way of laying ground rules for story writing through example.
Goldberg focuses mainly on detail. Detail is what truly makes a story and sets it above other works of fiction. Use actual details from real life to help bring the story to life in the readers mind. Goldberg does a fine example of showing how important detail is when baking a cake. "you can't just mix ingredients in bowl" about sums up what she is trying to convey by using explicit details.