Using Pull Quotes To Attract Readers

What pulls you into a printed page and makes you read?

I’ve always been a sucker for pull quotes, whether they’re in an article on a topic I’m passionate about (like animal rescue) or a topic you have to drag me kicking and screaming to (like diversification in investment portfolios). They consistently pull me in and make me look for the paragraph that they were drawn from. First I read the source paragraph. Then I read the section the paragraph is in. Gradually, I wind my way deeper into the entire article. I’ve read hundreds of articles in spite of their headlines — and because of their pull quotes.

The “pull quote” may well be the most under-used method of inviting readers to read technical communications, and even some business communications. And it’s a shame really since they can be a very effective way to show readers the kind of information they’ll find if they take a few minutes to read a little more, and the kind of insights that experts provide in the piece.

Magazines have long used “pull quotes” as prominent elements in their page design for articles. When a graphic designer uses the design power of fonts, font attributes (e.g., size, weight, and style), color, borders, shading, and even icons to format pull quotes and make them stand out on a page, these quotes essentially become graphic objects in and of themselves.

In my days as a magazine editor, at least once an issue we had an article that was a design challenge. Perhaps there wasn’t a meaningful screen shot that could be used (did readers really need a screen shot that showed the same FDISK command line that we’d already provided in the article?). Perhaps the topic didn’t lend itself easily to a table or a pie chart or a bar graph — at least not one that didn’t look contrived. Perhaps there were no photos that could be used. We had a page full of text and nothing to break it up.

Enter the pull quote.

Sometimes, the pull quote we picked would literally be that: a quote from one of the article’s sources, either used partially or entirely. We couldn’t use any quote, of course. We had to find something that stood on its own, that was insightful, that popped. We wanted quotes that would make readers stop and look for the paragraph in which the quote appeared so they could read more. On occasion, we used a quote from a source that was really attention-grabbing, but which the writer had been unable to find a place for in the article (although they’d used other quotes from the same source).

Direct-quote pull quotes were creative fun for both editors and designers as we strove to make them pop and zing off a page — without making them look garish or bulky. It mystifies me that I don’t see them used more in newsletters, white papers, and other corporate materials. Not too long ago, Michael Stelzner over at Writing White Papers found a great example, and there’s as much to be learned from the ensuing dialogue between blog readers as from the white paper itself. Liz Strauss uses quotes effectively over at Successful Blog, particularly in her profiles of individual bloggers.

Pull quotes were easy to find in articles about big topics — trends, predictions, controversies, security concerns, and so forth. They were hard to come by in articles about, say, the FORMAT or FDISK command in MS-DOS, or Registry editing in Windows. Creativity is hard to come by in Yawn City.

So we’d look for things that could stand on their own and help drive important points home:

• Back up data files before using format c:
• Create a copy of your Registry before you edit it.
• Test backup disks before you’re in crisis mode.
• Unplug your PC before opening it.

With technical material, in particular, calling out important points in pull-quote-style can be far more effective at making the points stick in the reader’s head than simply putting them in bold or italic text in the body of a paragraph. Not only does it grab their attention initially and draw them into the details on the page, but the reader forever sees it in their mind’s eye as this element that was set apart from everything else on the page. It must be important, s/he theorizes, if the writer worked that hard to call attention to it.

Take a look at something you’ve written — a Getting Started Guide, a marketing case study, the next issue of your user newsletter. What could you pull out and highlight?