What writers & others say
“Most quotes in press releases sound like the teacher in Charlie Brown cartoons: ‘Wah wah wah wah.’”
— A frustrated PR pro
“killerbite: A very clever — but very brief — statement. A killer sound bite.”
— BuzzWhack
“LAQs: A publicist’s worst nightmare: Lame-ass quotes. In a sound bite world, the last thing you want are LAQs.”
— BuzzWhack
“Sprinkling quotes is one thing. Hosing them on is another.”
— John B. Campbell, former senior editor, Business Week
“The language of journalism is not like speech, but it is closer to speech than most other forms of writing. It also explains the journalistic obsession with quoting, the attempts to represent speech in prose. Too often, especially in government stories, this means experts speaking in code, or in meaningless sound bites.”
— Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at The Poynter Institute
“Putting those little wiggly marks around words does not a quote make. It may look like a quote. It may act like a quote. But it’s really just another sentence wearing a quote disguise.”
— Steve Crescenzo, CEO, Crescenzo Communications
“For media, a press release without effective quotes is like reading the dictionary: You get the information you need, but it’s not much fun.”
— Lisa Goldsberry, writer, Axia PR
“A good quote gets noticed. A great quote gets repeated.”
— Lisa Goldsberry, writer, Axia PR
“Too many good ideas are buried in Dilbert-esque releases because … every corporate executive gets quoted.”
— Alison Harris, publisher, Call Center News
“Of all the devices that can add humanity to your writing, the direct quotation is the most overused. A newspaper sports story or a traditional news feature may contain a direct quote in every other paragraph, a practice that usually produces a parade of inane or merely dull utterances.”
— Jack Hart, author, A Writer’s Coach
“Nothing dulls up a piece of writing like a stream of boring quotations.”
— Jack Hart, author, A Writer’s Coach
“What others say about you and your product, service, or business is at least 1,000 times more convincing than what you say, even if you are 2,000 times more eloquent.”
— Dan Kennedy, author of No B.S. Sales Success
“A line of dialogue is not clear enough if you need to explain how it’s said.”
— Elmore Leonard, author of Get Shorty and 39 other novels
“Quotes that are colorful and clear prevent your press release from sounding like paragraphs of facts that don’t give the reader any human interaction.”
— Despina Maris, client success manager, XAmplifie
“Soundbites can be funny, frightening, hard-hitting or emotional. Above all, they must be short, sharp and relevant.”
— Bill Penn, author, in Market Yourself Through the Media
“A great ear for dialogue has nothing to do with being a human tape recorder. If you truly wrote down how people speak, it would be like a bad Andy Warhol movie.”
— Richard Price, author of “The Wire”
“Business communicators publish the worst quotes in the industry — and we write them ourselves!”
— Mark Ragan, CEO of Ragan Communications
“Many people seem less quotable the higher they ascend in organizational life. Maybe frontline workers seem to say more interesting things in print because they don’t have anybody ghostwriting their comments.
“Worse still, when we ghost quotes for leaders, we aren’t satisfied with just one. He or she must say three or four things that don’t sound like a person talking, or that leave readers scratching their heads.”
— Chris Smith, Entergy Corp. editorial guru
“Other people’s words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you’re going.”
— Zadie Smith, British novelist
“I think of quotes as spices. Spices in themselves have no nutritional value. They make nutritious things taste better but, like spices, quotes should be used sparingly.”
— Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, The Washington Post
“[Corporate quotes] make the people we’re quoting sound like pompous asses who have nothing to contribute to your story except to bring it to a halt and make people stop reading. Every corporate quote seems to say to the reader: ‘If only Sally Field were here to paraphrase how we feel.’”
— Wired magazine
“Bad quotes will destroy your story. You can’t hide them. They have those big honking quotation marks around them, announcing to every reader that someone is speaking.”
— Jim Ylisela, Jr., president of Duff Media Partners Inc.
“Control the blather.”
— Jim Ylisela, Jr., president of Duff Media Partners Inc.
‘I’m in this story because my name has to be mentioned, but I don’t really have anything to add on this subject.’”
— Jim Ylisela, Jr., president of Duff Media Partners Inc.
“Readers pay more attention to quotes, because they want to hear from people directly, and when the result is babble and innocuous platitudes, they leave disappointed.”
— Jim Ylisela, Jr., president of Duff Media Partners Inc.
“We spend so much time blaming the suits for talking like automatons (and they do), but we’re not doing them any favors. When it’s left to us, our quotes aren’t much better, and because they don’t actually come out of anyone’s mouth during a conversation, they’re often much worse.”
— Jim Ylisela, Jr., president of Duff Media Partners Inc.
Boost PR coverage with killer bites
25% of reporters rank quotes as the least important element in a press release — after the boilerplate and dateline (Greentarget).
How can you turn lame-ass, unimportant quotes into scintillating sound bites that reporters actually appreciate and use?
Learn how to write killer sound bites for your releases and other messages at our executive quotes-writing workshop.
