Editors occasionally ask me to suggest pull quotes for my articles. It's something I dislike doing -- isn't that a bit like asking visual artists to select only a part of a painting to put in a catalog, one wonders? Well okay, it's not really. But still, it's a job I'd prefer to leave to someone else.
The exercise, however, does make me appreciate the art behind a truly great pull quote. Most of all, you have to know your audience. What in the body of the piece you are excerpting, you have to ask yourself, will excite them most and be most likely to persuade them to read the entire thing?Which brings me to a pull quote I came across this week that, to my mind, is just about perfect. Here it is:I watch my medlars getting fatter all summer, hoping the squirrels will keep their paws off until the fruit has just started to soften.
That's it. Did it work for you? Are you hooked?
Well, the author is culinary writer Nigel Slater. The venue is The Garden, house magazine of the Royal Horticultural Society. Obscure fruiting trees; summer; the pulse-quickening entrance of squirrels onto the scene: you can bet that single line had the magazine's entire readership anxious to read on.
It's a great article, by the way (in the November 09 issue, but not available online). It has me thinking that maybe a medlar is just what I need.