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Best Practices for Using Block Quotes and Pull Quotes in Your Stories
It’s not just a style thing
The quote feature in the Medium Editor gives you two styles to work with: block quotes and pull quotes. To use the feature, highlight the text you’ve written and the quote option will pop up (you can find more info in the Help Center on this). You can use this feature on any text you’ve written, so there’s a ton of flexibility.
While the tool can be used to offer some style differentiation alone, there are best practices and common use cases to improve readability and hone the writing in your stories.
In “The Definitive Guide to Medium’s Quotation Feature,” K M Brown offers straightforward best practices on using block quotes and pull quotes. From Brown:
Either form can improve your writing, the blockquote by presenting another perspective and clearly acknowledging authorship, the pull quote by piquing readers’ curiosity and luring them into your tale. But if you’re going to accomplish these goals, you’ll have to adhere to form.
Lately, I’ve been using block quotes frequently in publishing shortform. You can highlight a passage from a story that resonates with you, and link to the source. For more tips on shortform, see Michelle Legro’s “How to Publish Shortform.”
For pull quotes, I’ll often add them in the production stage just before publishing. Look at what line captures a key takeaway of the story, what line can sit on its own. It usually feels like something you’d highlight as a reader (or tweet out). It might feel a bit awkward repeating part of the story as a writer, but as a reader it’s helpful. It feels kind of like a magazine and adds that extra ✨. The pull quote helps introduce some visual variation in the story, while also recapping a key idea.
Check out the full guide by K M Brown.
