成寒教材研讀

Perhaps from his delight at working under deadline pressure, he would always present my copyedited paper to me at breakfast, about an hour before I had to be at school. There it lay, beside my plate, marked-up with squiggles, circles, and STETs--the arcana of the trade known mainly to professional editors. At a glance it looked like my poor essay had fallen overnight into the hands of prehistoric cave painters.

“All right, let’s start at the top,” Dad would say, in a friendly tone. “The title is interesting, but it doesn’t really have much to do with what follows, does it?”

“Doesn’t it?”

“No. Don’t make the reader work too hard. Draw the person in. Don’t confuse him right away.”

“I suppose not....”

And so it would go.

He would point out places where I had committed serious stylistic errors: writing sentences that began with long dependent clauses (“Don’t keep the reader waiting for the meaning.”); using a strident, hectoring tone (“Alienate the reader by preaching and you’ll never get him back.”); babbling on about something irrelevant (“The worse thing you can have a reader say is, ‘So what?’”).

so = in this manner   it = our communication/conversation

And so it would go. = Our conversation would proceed in this manner.

隨後，我們的對話就會像剛剛這 樣。
（怎樣？老爹繼續對我的作文一樣一樣挑毛病。）