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?’”).
