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How strong your antipathy! Many people think pull quotes look good and serve a purpose, print or digital. I agree with them.
by devindotcom 5y ago
How strong your antipathy! Many people think pull quotes look good and serve a purpose, print or digital. I agree with them.
- rgovostes 5y agoHere's a screenshot from one of your articles: https://i.imgur.com/5AJ5mut.png https://i.imgur.com/5AJ5mut.png (Crudely made on iOS, sorry.) When am I supposed to read the highlighted text? Is it when it was pulled out and strongly emphasized? Or when it appears again, separated by a single paragraph, in the flow of how you originally composed the article? Or in this one: https://i.imgur.com/DnhsI8n.jpg https://i.imgur.com/DnhsI8n.jpg -- the pull quote comes after what I've just read, instead of before it, so I may have the pleasure of reading it twice. Both copies of the text are on my screen at the same time. Can you imagine if a podcast every few minutes repeated a sentence that was just spoken seconds ago, only at 4x volume, and then just resumed as if nothing happened? (A comment about this second example: The paragraph directly after the pull quote starts, "The FCC took on this question..." Which "question" am I supposed to interpret this as? The one in the pull quote or the one in the previous body paragraph? The pull quote has not only screwed up the ordering of the text, but added ambiguity merely through its presence.) If your intent is to appeal to readers who just flick through the page to read the headlines, why not write in bulleted form like Axios? If your intent is to look attractive, a text-heavy format is not ideal.
- codemac 5y agoCan you state the purpose? It's really not clear to me in digital. As a reader that actually likes to read, they are distracting, they are frustrating to accidentally read and reread, and pull me out of the story. In digital formats, if these are much past the fold say maybe one to two screen lengths down, what purpose could they possibly be serving to the reader? I can't figure them out at all. You should reward the reader, not distract and waste their time with duplicate content.