It’s baseball season, and for Detroit Tigers fans, we hope, the Year of the Tiger (yes, after a seven-game losing streak, there is still hope). In honor of the Great American Pastime, I want to talk about some of the words and phrases in (American) English that have come to us courtesy of baseball:

• Out in / out of left field – Out in left field is used to refer to someone whose ideas or actions are, according to Answers.com, “a little crazy.” There are various theories for the origin of this phrase, two of which have to do with the New York Yankees, so I will not discuss them here. (The Yankees get enough attention, most of it undeserved.) One of the other theories is interesting: Before the Chicago Cubs moved to Wrigley Field, they played at Chicago’s second West Side Park, which was later bought by the University of Illinois College of Medicine. Eventually, U of I built its Neuropsychiatric unit on what had been West Park’s left field. You can connect the dots from there. A related phrase means something unexpected happening, as in, “Wow, that came out of left field.” When a runner is traveling from third base trying to score, he may be thrown out at home plate by a ball delivered by the left fielder, whom the runner has his back to and therefore can’t see.
• Drop the ball – OK, so this expression could refer to multiple sports—basketball, football, even dodgeball. Now I’m curious about whether the phrase truly did originate in baseball. Excuse me just a moment while I check … I’m back. There’s no real agreement on the origin of the phrase, probably because it’s so generic. In any case, if you do drop the ball while you’re attempting to catch a fly one, throw a baserunner out, or catch a wild pitch, chances are good it’ll come back to haunt you later. Big-time.
• Three strikes and you’re out – This one is pretty self-explanatory, but let’s give it a positive spin, shall we? If you watch any great match-up between a pitcher and a hitter, you’ll see that the hitter actually gets an unlimited number of chances to hit the ball (not only three), as long as he can “stay alive” by getting a piece of it, or hitting the ball foul. Foul balls only count as strikes up to the second one—strike three must be a swinging strike. So, you’ll hear sports announcers say a hitter has a “great at-bat” if he can extend the number of pitches the pitcher throws him to eight, ten or even a dozen. There’s a life lesson here, so excuse me if I sound like a self-help expert for a moment: In real life, as in baseball, you get more than three chances. Just keep trying to get a piece of the ball. And don’t swing at the really bad pitches.
• Threw me a curveball – We’ve all had the  experience of someone hitting us with an unpleasant surprise, whether it takes the shape of a last-minute meeting at work, a late-night phone call or a breakup announcement delivered by that most sensitive of social media, Facebook. Yup, someone just threw us a curveball, and our first response is often to throw the darn thing back, only harder. The trajectory of the curveball is north-to-south (like a rainbow’s arc), so it has the effect of dropping suddenly as it crosses home plate, leaving hitters swinging at the place they thought the ball was going to be. Here’s the thing to remember about curveballs: pitchers don’t throw them to hit batters, but to unbalance them. Maybe that’s true of life’s curveballs, too, even though they do sometimes hurt. (See a video about Tigers pitcher Justin Verlander’s curveball.)
• Hit a home run or Hit it out of the park – People use this as a compliment: “Wow, Joe, you really hit it out of the park with that idea.” If you’re a frequent home run hitter, chances are you’ll be welcome on any team. All home runs aren’t alike in importance, though all are exciting. The more runners there are on base, the more meaningful a home run is; a grand slam garners the hitter’s team four runs. So, while “hitting it out of the park” (that is, hitting the ball over the stands) is a display of a hitter’s power, it’s more significant to hit a home run with runners on base. Another thing about home runs: the more of them a hitter produces, the more strikeouts he is likely to have—case in point, Babe Ruth. He had 714 career home runs and nearly twice as many strikeouts at 1330. The moral of the story has been repeated multiple times, but I’ll restate it here: You have to take a lot of big swings in order to hit home runs. Sometimes you’ll miss, but sometimes you’ll hit it out of the park.
• For you Tigers fans, here’s your very own list of baseball names and words that, taken as a group, are probably only meaningful to you: Mags, Miggy, Cabby, Gibby, Sparky, Ernie, Pudge, JV, DD, Game 163, Jim Joyce, Paws, 1968, Rod & Mario, Jim & Dan, and finally, “near-perfect game.”

I could write about the marketing aspect of baseball, but that gets into unknown (foul?) territory. I just love the game itself, and don’t want to bother myself with all the moneymaking and shaking going on. Now I’m off to see if the Tigers can break their losing streak and head toward first place again!

Until recently, if you called my home phone number, you’d hear a cheerful message recorded by me announcing that you’d reached “Monica Getz, your Mary Kay Beauty Consultant.” Yup, that’s me. Used to working from home as a proofreader and editor for the years I was raising my two daughters, I was particularly attracted to the “independent” part of the “Independent Beauty Consultant” label when I signed up to sell cosmetics in January of 2002.

I admit, I was one of those “not in a million years” types of women when it came to the idea of selling Mary Kay. It wasn’t that I was averse to the idea of selling. And I wasn’t opposed to either makeup in general or Mary Kay cosmetics in particular. It was just the idea of me selling makeup that gave me pause. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a lot of pressure in the advertising world to think big. Agencies compete for “big” clients, who in turn want big ideas for big returns in the form of increased customer awareness, sales and profit. Type “think big advertising” into your Google search bar and you’ll score no less than 165 million hits. The “big” mentality can be intoxicating, with its attendant rushes of adrenaline, awards and acclaim. But merely thinking big can leave some important things behind in the dust—things like integrity, loyalty and just plain human decency.

In their book The Power of Small: Why Little Things Make All the Difference, Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval talk about how focusing on the details yields big results. They know whereof they speak. Their agency, The Kaplan Thaler Group, started as a two-woman ad firm with a single Clairol Herbal Essences account and grew to renown as the creator of the ubiquitous Aflac duck. An excerpt from the inside front cover flap captures the flavor of the book: “Our smallest actions and gestures often have an outsized impact on our biggest goals… Going that extra inch—whether with a client, customer, family member or friend—speaks volumes to others about our talent, personality and motivations.” Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re launching a new website, chances are you’ve made sure you’ve got the design and programming locked down. You know your site—your baby—needs to look better than your rudimentary web design skills will allow, and you’re the first to admit you know nothing about even the basics of programming, so you’re happy to farm those out. But the writing? Ah, the writing. Now that’s something you know how to do—and how hard can it be, really?

There’s the rub. And here are a few misconceptions people have about writing website copy.

1. If you can write well (or you’re in marketing), you can write web copy. Well, yes and no. A doctor can probably do a self-appendectomy if necessary, and a stylist can cut her own hair. But better to let someone else do it for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s hard to get the “angle” just right. And secondly, web copywriting is a special kind of writing. Sure, if you can write, you can learn to write websites and do it well. But you may not want to make yours or your company’s website your first try—at least not without some help.
2. It’s like writing a paper or an article. If you take this approach you may fall into what I call sequentialism, that is, the tendency to want each page to be a continuation of another, “previous” page. But if you take off your writer’s cap and put on your surfing-the-web-at-lunchtime cap, you’ll realize why this doesn’t make any sense. No one reads web pages in the order you think they should. There’s not even any guarantee that web users will enter your site via your home page, although you hope they will (that’s why you’ll make an extra effort to design and write your home page as carefully as you decorate your home’s entryway–because that’s probably the first thing people will see and it represents you).
3. Or, conversely, it’s like writing a bunch of one-page ads. If you write your web copy this way, you avoid the error of sequentialism but can instead fall into the trap of providing no connectedness between pages. When you write website copy, it’s important to keep in mind the overall structure of your website, the pages and subpages that are related to each other by subject, with major points and subpoints called out from page to page–and links between them to lead the reader where he wants to go.
4. Because there is so little copy on a page, it should be easy to crank out in no time. Anyone who writes regularly knows how easy it is to spend hours, nay days, reworking a single paragraph to get it just right. But because web copy can appear to be so much marketing “fluff” to outsiders, it looks easier to write than it is. With web copywriting, just as in any other kind of writing, every word counts. And you should make sure you allot a fair amount of time to the process, taking into account time for research, consulting with your web designer and programmer, and meetings with supervisors and others who have an investment in the final result.
5. I want my website to appeal to intellectuals or experts in the field, so I need to make my copy sufficiently lofty. With this approach, writers can fall into the trap of wordiness, jargon and excess, both in length of copy and in word choice. Web writers need to keep in mind that even the most expert of their site visitors will appreciate well-written, tight copy arranged in digestible chunks through the judicious use of subheads, bullet points and helpful links.
6. I need to cover the page topic thoroughly. This is a tough one. Unless your site is strictly informative, its goal is usually not to have site visitors read every last word of your copy—it’s to get them to do something else, whether that’s to buy a product, sign up for your company newsletter or call you to schedule a service or consultation. The key is to give people enough information to understand what you have to offer without boring them and sending them clicking frantically to get to a competitor’s site that can give them what they want quicker and without all the fuss. I received a wake-up call on this topic when a coworker (who shall remain unnamed) said to me when looking over my home page copy for a client site said, “But who’s going to read all this stuff?” Point taken. I don’t think I ever made that mistake again, and for that I am grateful to the coworker.
7. My cleverly written web copy will be my claim to fame. Don’t we wish. Maybe some of us will get an award for our copywriting excellence. But if we fall in love with our own writing such that we can’t edit it down, or if the “voice” the site copy speaks in is ours instead of the voice needed to speak to site visitors, our web copy will ring false and fail to connect with potential customers.

One helpful resource we’ve used here at Hile is the book Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. Although it’s a book about web usability and not specifically about copywriting, there’s so much helpful information in here, everyone who has anything to do with creating websites should read it. And, more specifically for writers, it can never hurt to take another (or first) look at Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. You can buy it on Amazon or just about anywhere, or you can save yourself some money and access it online.

Still want to write your own web copy? Go for it. Need a little help? Let us know. Hile provides a variety of copywriting services to meet your web writing needs, from consulting on your copy, to proofreading and light editing, to writing all of the copy for your site.