Add passion, personality to your sound bites
Add personality to your quotes through passion, humanity and colloquialisms.
Make it personal.
When two-thirds of Californians failed every question on a fast food nutrition quiz, the California Center for Public Health Advocacy distributed a release including this sound bite. The subject matter expert makes the story personal by talking about his own experience with the quiz:
Take me there.
In another release, spokespeople for the California Center for Public Health Advocacy demonstrate how hard it is to intuit the number of calories in a fast food item. The quote pulls me into the room and the demonstration:
“In a Capitol room thick with the smell of fast food and breakfast entrees, proponents of Senate Bill 120 (Padilla-D Los Angeles), the proposed nutrition menu labeling law, dramatically illustrated why this legislation needs to be signed by the Governor.
“‘You choose,’ Assemblyman Mark DeSaulnier prompted the crowded room as he displayed a plate with two Big Macs, one with four hamburgers and a tall chocolate milkshake. ‘Which has the most calories?’ Except for two insiders who admitted they had seen the study before, not one of the guests in the room chose the milkshake with its whopping 1,160 calories.”
Show some emotion.
This quote from a Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign by the Illinois Coalition for Competitive Telecommunications does just that. As a result, it makes a yawn of a topic — telecom deregulation — interesting:
Help us hear him.
This quote — from a Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign for Xerox Corporations’ office makeover contest — is attributed to “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s” Thom Filicia. Because we’ve seen him on TV, we can literally hear him say:
Bottom line: At the very least, your quotes should convey humanity, passion and a point of view.
How can you write PR quotes that get quoted?
Reporters rank quotes the least important element in a news release — after the boilerplate and the dateline.
Learn to turn lame-ass quotes into scintillating sound bites that reporters will actually use at NOT Your Father’s PR Writing — our media relations-writing workshop starting July 12.There, you’ll steal techniques from Silver Anvil winners for making your sound bites sound better … learn how to transform your quotations from bleh to brilliant … and steal tricks from The New York Times to avoid overquoting.
Plus: Find out how to avoid the worst PR quote clichés (PR Newswire sees 1,284 of these in a single month.)
Save up to $100 with our group discounts.
Leave a Reply