Laser Cutter Build Night: Final Stepper Wiring (Hopefully)

In tonight's progress, I did some extra wiring for the EasyDrivers.  As it turns out, a few online tutorials suggest tying all the GROUND pins together to synchronize the voltages or something like that.  To do this, I chopped up some female pin headers into individual pins that can connect to the three grounds on the EasyDriver.  These three grounds include the Raspberry Pi signal ground, the motor power supply ground, and the ground for an optional EasyDriver external power supply.  I used this blog post as a reference for what to do.
However, I noticed that the blog post says to connect the STEP and DIRECTION pins on the EasyDriver to ground by a 1K resistor.  None of the Arduino tutorials ever mention this.  Additionally, it is hard to know (due to annoying lack of Internet information) whether other people with working Raspberry Pi-EasyDriver combos used these resistors or not.  Thus, this could be the end of the wiring for the stepper motors or I could have to add some resistors.