Copyediting sample 21:
Intensity in the driveway

An editor often needs to repair a syntactic structure to restore parallelism, thereby facilitating (speeding) a reader’s comprehension.

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This sample is presented here with the author’s permission.

Original
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I wasn’t thrilled to be sitting in Ted’s driveway, much less in Brice Prairie. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling—what I was supposed to be feeling—but it was fucking intense, and I wanted it to stop. I wasn’t sure how much Ted was contributing to my current emotional state, how much was about being in Brice Prairie again, and how much was due to something else entirely, like the anxiety I was feeling about my new assignment.

Markup
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I wasn’t thrilled to be sitting in Ted’s driveway, much less in Brice Prairie. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling—what I was supposed to be feeling—but it was fucking intense, and I wanted it to stop. I wasn’t sure how much Ted was contributing to my current emotional state, much was Ted’s contribution to my current emotional state, [revision to restore syntactic (and rhetorical) parallelism with three instances of “how much was [noun or gerund phrase],”] how much was about being in Brice Prairie again, and how much was due to something else entirely, like the entirely—such as the anxiety I was feeling about my new assignment.

Result
Click to go to the next sample in the series.

I wasn’t thrilled to be sitting in Ted’s driveway, much less in Brice Prairie. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling—what I was supposed to be feeling—but it was fucking intense, and I wanted it to stop. I wasn’t sure how much was Ted’s contribution to my current emotional state, how much was about being in Brice Prairie again, and how much was due to something else entirely—such as the anxiety I was feeling about my new assignment.