Pull Quote
A short, eye-catching quote lifted from an article and displayed in large type for emphasis.
A pull quote is a short, striking passage extracted from a longer article and displayed in larger, contrasting typography — often centred or set in a sidebar — to attract the reader's eye and tease the content.
Pull quotes are a design-magazine convention that crossed into web publishing in the 2000s. They serve scanning readers, who decide in seconds whether an article is worth reading. A well-chosen pull quote signals the article's tone, argument, or most quotable line.
Editors choose pull quotes that are punchy in isolation, not necessarily the central argument of the piece. Writers, knowing this, increasingly write with the pull quote in mind.
“The pull quote is the sentence a reader remembers after they close the magazine.”
Keep reading the glossary
A long quotation set off as its own indented paragraph, without quotation marks.
A short, vivid extract from a longer speech, designed to be repeated by news media.
Square brackets mark editorial changes inside a quotation — clarifications, edits, or [sic].
Three dots that mark words omitted from a quotation.