Writing is not simply mastering the knowledge that experts have propounded for centuries about what they think made them good writers and their writing effective and popular. If it were, then English pedants, those folk sacred to every high school graduate's nightmares, would be our society's best writers. In fact, very few writing instructors actually ever write anything but comments on student papers, and those have seldom been noted for their literary merit or even legibility. The writers of the Daedalus software propose that good writing consists of the fine-tuned ability to manage words and ideas in such a way that the reader not only wants to continue reading but actually accepts some of the tenets of the writer and adopts them as his or her own. The writer learns how to affirmatively affect the reader not by gleaning such things from a book or ingesting words of wisdom in a crowded classroom, but by getting a variety of reactions to a variety of the writer's efforts, and time and again adjusting effort for maximum positive effect.
All creatures do it, constantly, necessarily, in order to survive and thrive.
Our senses provide us persistent feedback informing us whether we are driving too fast, eating too much, or talking too loudly. All writers do it, consciously or not, no matter how much they claim that they do not care what the reader thinks of their efforts. The Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment is the best means of providing student writers constant and productive reader feedback. The student writes a draft on the computer and mails the draft to a peer reader. The peer reader, perhaps responding to a set of prompts or guidelines provided by the instructor, then critiques the draft and sends the critique back to the writer.