What does "S.O.P." mean?
Hi,
What does "S.O.P." mean?

"Which is to say that by no means do you want a reader to come away thinking the cycle is just a cute formal exercise in interrogative structure and S.O.P. metatext."

Question

What does "S.O.P." mean?
Hi, 
What does "S.O.P." mean?

"Which is to say that by no means do you want a reader to come away thinking the cycle is just a cute formal exercise in interrogative structure and S.O.P. metatext."

Answer

Standard Operating Procedure. It's the way you normally do things, or a defined method in which something is done.

Answer

You might need to give more context.  Wikipedia gives 25 entries for that abbreviation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOP), and there are more possibilities than just that, especially in a technical context, as your sentence seems to be.  Forty's comment gives the most common one, though.  (Standard Operating Procedure)