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Pulling In Readers With Pull Quotes

By Michael Stelzner

Are you a skim reader? Chances are pretty good that your readers like to skim.

Whether they are reading articles, blog posts or white papers, readers want a taste or preview. This is where pull quotes come in.

Tangent: Before I get into this, did anyone notice that the TV show “24″ had a white paper in it? Nice to see white papers in top television programs.

What is a pull quote? Simply said, a pull quote is a short block of text designed to “pull” a reader into a document and it is typically “pulled” from existing content.

Whitney Potsus of Connected Content recently wrote a great article about pull quotes.

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.

What do you think about pull quotes? Should they be used more often?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Writing White Papers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

  • Whitney - Thanks so much for the clarification. Keep up the good blog posts. - Mike
  • Well, gosh, color me happy. I get back into town, get caught up on my reading, and find a wonderful surprise on the ol' WWP blog. Thank you, Mike!

    I *love* Simon's analogy of raspberries in the All-Bran. The image works particularly well when you talk about using pull quotes in technical documents.

    In my publishing work, "pull quotes" was often used to refer to direct quotes (the original meaning of the term) and paraphrases pulled from the copy. In technical documentation, I don't hear the term "pull quote" bandied about a lot, but when it is used it's to refer to direct quotes pulled from the copy. "Callout" is used a lot to refer to paraphrases and (as Kristen mentioned) references to tables and figures.

    Whitney
  • Kristen - What, you want me to give away my secrets! :) Actually that pull quote was created by someone else.

    Thanks for your clarification on this matter.

    Mike
  • I always think of callouts as "see Fig 1A." Pull quotes are entry points on the page that are typically a direct quotation of material in the article, but that could be a paraphrase.

    And speaking of entry points, Michael, I love the look of the one you've got here. Did you just insert a graphic, or is there some amazing code I can use to create pull quites? Do tell.

    kk
  • Jonathan - I am not a journalist or designer, but I do not really see a difference here. In the context of this piece they are one in the same. - Mike
  • Are "pull quotes" and "callouts" the same thing?

    I thought pull quotes are used for referencing actual quotes while callouts are used to highlight any sentence on the page.

    Your thoughts?
  • Great analogy Simon
  • Yes, I love pull quotes -- I use them in almost all the publications I design.

    Pull quotes are like the little raspberries in a bowl of All Bran -- they make the eating so much nicer!
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