Catching the ‘ear’ of colleagues using salient quotations

Engage your readers by eliciting and recognizing strong and humanizing utterances

Quotes can make or break your writing.

Whether in a press release, an e-mail or a newspaper story, good quotes deliver the impact that a dry narrative simply can’t.

If you’re editing a newsletter or posting entries to your blog or company intranet, the pull quote—that spoken gem to which you can give a big, fancy type treatment—will break up a story and grab a reader’s attention.

So says Ari Adler, professional communicator and strategist.

“You’re looking for that pull quote,” Adler told his audience at the recent Ragan Corporate Communicators Conference. “That’s what you want. You want a good heading, you want a good story, but that pull quote is something that can be said in a way that’s a little more witty or something that’s powerful.”

Conducting interviews, of course, is all about getting the right quotes from your interviewee. For internal publications, you want compelling quotes from the CEO, middle managers, and the rank-and-file—in order to engage your entire workforce. But how do you extract this verbal gold?