Surely there has to be some aesthetic guidance along the way?

Up until my senior year of college, every writing course I took, I would never get any _aesthetic_ feedback on my work. In grade school, my grammar and spelling would get corrected, but otherwise, what I wrote was what I wrote.

It wasn't until I took a sitcom-writing course in college that a teacher gave me feedback that would make my writing better: "this sentence is too long, you don't need to use these words, this character is too inactive, this scene has no point."

If someone had been that direct with me when I was in middle school, I'd have spent a lot less time writing crap.