{"id":26954,"date":"2021-06-16T06:53:03","date_gmt":"2021-06-16T10:53:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wyliecomm.com\/?page_id=26954"},"modified":"2024-01-17T10:44:13","modified_gmt":"2024-01-17T14:44:13","slug":"quotes-about-public-relations-quotes","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.wyliecomm.com\/writing-tips\/public-relations-writing\/press-release-quotes\/quotes-about-public-relations-quotes\/","title":{"rendered":"Quotes about public relations quotes"},"content":{"rendered":"

What writers & others say<\/h2>\n

\"Quotes

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\u201cMost quotes in press releases sound like the teacher in Charlie Brown cartoons: \u2018Wah wah wah wah.\u2019\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 A frustrated PR pro<\/h6>\n
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\u201ckillerbite: A very clever \u2014 but very brief \u2014 statement. A killer sound bite.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 BuzzWhack<\/h6>\n
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\u201cLAQs: A publicist\u2019s worst nightmare: Lame-ass quotes. In a sound bite world, the last thing you want are LAQs.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 BuzzWhack<\/h6>\n
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\u201cSprinkling quotes is one thing. Hosing them on is another.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 John B. Campbell, former senior editor, Business Week<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at The Poynter Institute<\/h6>\n
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\u201cPutting 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\u2019s really just another sentence wearing a quote disguise.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Steve Crescenzo, CEO, Crescenzo Communications<\/h6>\n
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\u201cFor media, a press release without effective quotes is like reading the dictionary: You get the information you need, but it\u2019s not much fun.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Lisa Goldsberry, writer, Axia PR<\/h6>\n
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\u201cA good quote gets noticed. A great quote gets repeated.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Lisa Goldsberry, writer, Axia PR<\/h6>\n
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\u201cToo many good ideas are buried in Dilbert-esque releases because \u2026 every corporate executive gets quoted.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Alison Harris, publisher, Call Center News<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cOf 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.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Jack Hart, author, A Writer\u2019s Coach<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cNothing dulls up a piece of writing like a stream of boring quotations.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Jack Hart, author, A Writer\u2019s Coach<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cWhat 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.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Dan Kennedy, author of No B.S. Sales Success<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cA line of dialogue is not clear enough if you need to explain how it\u2019s said.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Elmore Leonard, author of Get Shorty<\/em> and 39 other novels<\/h6>\n
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\u201cQuotes that are colorful and clear prevent your press release from sounding like paragraphs of facts that don\u2019t give the reader any human interaction.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Despina Maris, client success manager, XAmplifie<\/h6>\n
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\u201cSoundbites can be funny, frightening, hard-hitting or emotional. Above all, they must be short, sharp and relevant.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Bill Penn, author, in Market Yourself Through the Media<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201cA 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.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Richard Price, author of \u201cThe Wire\u201d<\/h6>\n
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\u201cBusiness communicators publish the worst quotes in the industry \u2014 and we write them ourselves!\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Mark Ragan, CEO of Ragan Communications<\/h6>\n
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\u201cMany 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\u2019t have anybody ghostwriting their comments.<\/h5>\n
\u201cWorse still, when we ghost quotes for leaders, we aren\u2019t satisfied with just one. He or she must say three or four things that don\u2019t sound like a person talking, or that leave readers scratching their heads.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Chris Smith, Entergy Corp. editorial guru<\/h6>\n
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\u201cOther people\u2019s words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you\u2019re going.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Zadie Smith, British novelist<\/h6>\n
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\u201cI 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.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, The Washington Post<\/em><\/h6>\n
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\u201c[Corporate quotes] make the people we\u2019re 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: \u2018If only Sally Field were here to paraphrase how we feel.\u2019\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Wired<\/em> magazine<\/h6>\n
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\u201cBad quotes will destroy your story. You can\u2019t hide them. They have those big honking quotation marks around them, announcing to every reader that someone is speaking.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Jim Ylisela, Jr., president of Duff Media Partners Inc.<\/h6>\n
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\u201cControl the blather.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Jim Ylisela, Jr., president of Duff Media Partners Inc.<\/h6>\n
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\u2018I\u2019m in this story because my name has to be mentioned, but I don\u2019t really have anything to add on this subject.\u2019\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Jim Ylisela, Jr., president of Duff Media Partners Inc.<\/h6>\n
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\u201cReaders 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.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Jim Ylisela, Jr., president of Duff Media Partners Inc.<\/h6>\n
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\u201cWe spend so much time blaming the suits for talking like automatons (and they do), but we\u2019re not doing them any favors. When it\u2019s left to us, our quotes aren\u2019t much better, and because they don\u2019t actually come out of anyone\u2019s mouth during a conversation, they\u2019re often much worse.\u201d<\/h5>\n
\u2014 Jim Ylisela, Jr., president of Duff Media Partners Inc.<\/h6>\n
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