The central problem for novice writers is how to revise, and revision requires not the application of abstract rules and guidelines but the ability to read critically, with a critical eye. Most students have not leaned to read critically. If they have learned to read well at all, they have learned to read professional text for the content, the great works and great essays and so forth, or at the very least, their textbooks. They have not learned to read text in order to evaluate self-consciously its capabilities. The intensive reading of student text, as all teachers of writing can attest, leads to the ability to read text critically, to discover in texts all the breakdowns and discontinuities that endanger the text's rhetorical effect.
Teachers learn how to read critically within the first year or two of teaching.
Without being given the opportunity to read amateur texts, however, the student never develops the ability to locate and evaluate elements in the text which need to be changed. Student writers therefore get no hands-on, incremental experience as editors or evaluators. They persistently devolve to making superficial changes draft after draft, to the consternation of their teachers who constantly plead for more serious revisions without ever having given their students the necessary experience at doing so. In effect, this is much the same as teaching cooking without a stove or automobile mechanics without an engine. The Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment provides the text distribution and management tool which allows students to engage in intensive writing with feedback.