by Monika Maeckle, Vice President, New Media
Our friends over at Ragan wrote an enviable dispatch recently, 4 Ways to Improve Quotes in Press Releases. Wish we had authored this one.
Quotes are a tradition in press releases and inject a human voice into the text. The challenge of balancing executives’ bloated claims in quotation marks with saying something meaningful continues for writes of press releases. Quotes riddled with jargon and buzzwords lose their meaning and leave the reader wondering, “Huh?”
Ragan cited this bad example of a quote from President and CEO John Johnson:
“I plan to continue this legacy of providing innovative products and services to our customers. With over 30 competing companies for our customers to choose from, we have some challenges ahead. I am confident that we can meet those challenges successfully. And the first step is the release of our new app.”
In such cases, better to paraphrase like this:
“President and CEO John Johnson believes the release of the new app will provide customers with the communications tools they need, setting XYZ Company apart from more than 30 competitors. “
Our own Andrew Guinn wrote about the grammar of quotation marks in press releases a few weeks ago–don’t you sometimes wonder where punctuation belongs? We also touched on making your quotes more notable in a recent Press Release Basics webinar last week.
Apart from injecting humanity into a press release, quotes are often featured as a “pull quote” drawing even more attention to their effectiveness–or lack of it. Best to craft them carefully.
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