Using quotations effectively
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Transcript
- How do you use quotations effectively?
- Lynn
It’s easy in radio because we talk to people so they give us their own quotes. (laughs) It’s a bit of a different issue for press.
- Julie
Yeah, I think people have their own style with using quotes and I have an article in here somewhere that uses quotes really nicely. I don’t know if you guys have heard of Grant Smithies, but he writes about music in the Sunday Star Times and he did this great article about Paul Potts. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, but he won this show called Britain’s Got Talent, and he’s this kind of, you know quite unassuming looking fellow who sort of turned up and the judges thought, “Who’s this guy going to be”, and then he sang with this sort of amazing opera voice. So he spends about half of the article just setting this guy’s personality up and sort of talking about how he’s a really unlikely person to have become famous and then he brings in the quotes about half way through and they’re really nicely selected quotes because they’re things like, he's talking about, he used to work at the car phone warehouse and he’s saying, “What are you going to do with your money and fame and success?”, and you know he says, “Oh you know I just want to take my friends out from the car phone warehouse and take them out for a meal.” So that’s what he’s going to do with all of his sort of millions of dollars that he gets from his record deals or whatever. So he’s just sort of, he’s obviously spoken to this guy for quite some time but he’s just really carefully selected these quotes that are sort of the most interesting and used them in a really nice way.
- Lynn
But be very careful about using quotes out of context. You can take lines from what Julie and I have said here at the end of the hour, put them in a different context, set them up with a different line and we could probably defame somebody you know. So use them, use them judiciously I think would be my advice. I’ve been misquoted in things before and it drives me nuts. I get really angry and it doesn’t really matter if there’s an apology printed the next day on page 97 under the TAB results you know, it doesn’t undo the damage that’s already been done. So be careful. Make sure those quotes are absolutely right.