Of pullquotes and callouts (please)

February 21, 2011
pullquote

Much ado about nothing, we fear, in this story by Chris Elliot, the Guardian readers’ editor, on misleading pullquotes.

For the uninitiated, pullquotes are “stylistic devices that give prominence to key quotations in a feature or news story. Set in a panel, the text is designed to catch the reader’s eye. They ought to make sense as a discrete piece of text but should also fit naturally with the other design features, known collectively as the ‘furniture’, within the context of a page or spread of pages” (thank you, Mr Elliot).

In other words, pullquotes, also known as callouts, are those bits of text that jump out at you in a story.

Mr Elliot spends a laudable amount of time discussing whether a Guardian pullquote concerning the former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni was misleading or not. However, this is small beer. If we turn to a magazine whose modesty we will preserve, we find, in no less a place than its lead feature, the most arresting pullquote of all – the one which is blank. Then, just a few pages on, we find another, of even more startling import. It says: “callout please callout please callout please callout please callout please callout please”.

In other words, the page slipped through the editing process without anyone realising that the pullquote, or, if you will, callout, needed to be filled in.

To which we can only say: callout, please…

Pictured courtesy of www.dustincurtis.com: the pullquote mantra (sort of).

 

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If you’re Joey Barton, attack is not the best form of defence

May 17, 2012

Interesting times, these, in the life of Joey Barton.

If the violence displayed by the QPR captain at Manchester City last Sunday was remarkable, his subsequent conduct on Twitter has been astonishing. Barton appears to have radically reinterpreted the notion that attack is the best form of defence, lashing out at all and sundry via a series of tweets whose ultimate effect is entirely self-destructive.

In the past 24 hours, Barton has accepted one charge of violent conduct at the Etihad Stadium but denied another. The FA seems set to throw the book at him, and his club has declared that it will deal with the matter after the result of the FA investigation. Conspiracy theorists might conclude that QPR’s management team and board hope that the FA ban Barton for so long a period (four months and more) that their reported desire to rip up his contract can only be bolstered.

What, then, should Barton do? Should he:

(a) Keep his head down and say nothing, or

(b) Issue a sensible statement in which he acknowledges that both his conduct at the Etihad and subsequent tweets have brought QPR into disrepute, and

(c) Add an apology to said statement, or

(d) Go to Portugal, log onto Twitter and tweet that the world is against him but that he doesn’t care because everyone is a moron and he’s worked really hard to get where he is and if anyone is nasty to him again he is going to expose their secrets.

The answer is not (d).

The moral of the story is that if you’re a loose cannon, when you turn attack into defence there is a danger that you will blow yourself up.

Gunning foglessly for clarity

May 15, 2012

A fine piece, this, on Winston Churchill’s gift for language and the obscurantism that goes with so much corporate communication.

But wait, what’s this? Could this injunction have been phrased rather more successfully:

Be concrete, not abstract. Use metaphors to get your message across.

Metaphors are, by definition, not exactly concrete. But be that as it may: there is a lot of sound advice in Clare Lynch’s piece and a revelation, too. We had never heard of the Gunning Fog Index.  But it exists, and reveals the age at which someone would have to leave full-time education to understand given text.

We’re pleased to display our own Gunning Fog rating for the above words. That of the Churchill speech cited by Ms Lynch was 9.698.

The Gunning Fog index is 9.585

Spin at the Leveson Inquiry

May 9, 2012
Leveson witch hunt

The idea that Lord Justice Leveson and his Inquiry’s QC, Robert Jay, are in need of PR advice is intriguing.

Surely their respective tasks ought to be immune from spin? Then again, perhaps the way in which they execute them is deserving of some communications advice. Either way, times have changed. A similar inquiry from yesteryear (and such do exist) would surely not have been accompanied, albeit informally, by communications advice.

Pictured courtesy of this Flickr user: a portrait of the Leveson Inquiry.