
Actually … You Can’t Cut the Proofreader:
Into the wild world of marketing agency editing
Imagine, for the moment, that the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook are in a race to complete a sentence.
They glare at each other like prizefighters before a match. Chicago, the time-tested veteran, stands tall. AP, the (comparatively) young and popular one, bounces back and forth.
The rest of us wait with a hard-to-describe feeling in our guts. (There’s an adjective for it somewhere.)
And who finishes first?
Chicago does because AP takes too damn long deciding whether to use the serial comma.
The pudding is in the proof
Proofreading is a long tradition, and in the age of still-young AI, it’s more important than ever. That’s partly because the role of the proofreader has widened. It’s no longer just about guarding the grammar; in many cases, it’s about guarding the truth.

Here are two significant examples.
At Actualize, our proofmasters spend much of their time verifying statistics and correcting citations. This is partly because our tech clients tend to be data-driven and create publications that rely on lots of studies and surveys. It’s also partly because it’s easy to misuse data — even accidentally, by good-hearted content creators — and intellectual honesty is important here.
Also — hot tip — with most research sources now existing online, it’s all too common to be served a great study or statistic by The Algorithm and then discover that it’s from four years ago. Three or four years ago is the Mesozoic era as far as technology writing is concerned.
For most technology publications, such a study should no longer be used or considered current, no matter how unbelievably conveniently it fills the space and supports the argument.
Sometimes you have to kill your darlings, as they say.

Concrete, but not weighed down
Proofreaders tend to be concrete thinkers. Not because they must adhere to The Rules without exception (most of them aren’t that crazy), but because they observe every day that using or disobeying The Rules creates concrete outcomes.
Those concrete outcomes are fascinating and powerful. Over here, a comma splice conveys sloppiness. Over there — only judiciously, mind you — a comma splice conveys linguistic efficiency.
And so on into infinity.
At Actualize, we of course invite our clients to use their own style guides and standards, which, unsurprisingly, vary widely and change all the time (sometimes to our chagrin). We don’t judge them, though: At some point you just need to decide, implement, and go for it until you build consistency. A sparse style guide applied consistently is much better than a great style guide that nobody uses.

Naturally, there are many considerations beyond a company’s style guide, and we track them. We often correct which type of English people are using, for example — British and EMEA style changes are increasingly common — and we stay updated on current disability standards, conscious language and diversity considerations, etc. Get these things right and nobody notices; mess them up and you’ll stand out for the wrong reasons.
Don’t quit the dictionary
Remember dictionaries? They still exist, and we still use them. We need them because the alternative is the internet.
Merriam-Webster continues to be our go-to at Actualize. And just how do words get added to the MW dictionary, you ask? The dictionary stipulates that a new word:
- Must have relatively widespread use and agreed-upon meaning
- Seems to have staying power
- Will be useful for a general audience
Merriam-Webster added 200 words in 2024, including such notables as beach read, nepo baby, heat index, IDGAF, and cash grab.
Oh, and here’s a surprise: AP says that one should use the serial comma if any element in the series has a conjunction (think “She ate rice and beans, tortillas, and chips.”).
AP is still holding out on adopting the serial comma universally. We’ll keep waiting.
You can’t cut the proofreader
Without proofreaders, we’d all be up a crock without a piddle. Our publications wouldn’t sing. Our preadolescent AI tools would take us off course. At Actualize, we know this because we see it constantly.
So we celebrate these wonderful humans and the work they do — often very late in the day, we’ll admit, because the rest of us took so long to get our act together.
