Catching Flack

The Building Blocks of Quotable Quotes

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If you want to make sure the information you are trying to get across in picked up, you need to make sure it is interested. Too often, business information is full of fluff words and jargon that makes it impossible for other people to care.

But what are the building blocks of interesting information, or “quotable quotes?” Here is what I call the FAME Formula. I’ve also uploaded a worksheet for you to use to develop your own quotable quotes using this formula:

Facts and figures: Details tell the story. For instance, you might say there were “six engineers who worked on the project for 10 months, with some of them pulling all-nighters and canceling vacations to make sure the product got out on time,” instead of “the new product was produced by a dedicated group of professionals.”
Analogies and metaphors: these are rhetorical devices that essentially help us explain things that people don’t know in terms they do understand. This is actually fairly commonly done, saying for example that a distance is the “length of 10 football fields” or something is “twice as tall as the Empire State Building.”
Make a reference to pop culture or current events: this is actually another twist on trying to explain things in terms people will understand. You don’t have to stretch and claim that Angelina Jolie uses your product or is coming to your ribbon-cutting if those would be falsehoods. Instead, you can say something like, “not everyone can have a glamorous lifestyle like Angelina and Brad. If you won’t be in Hollywood this weekend, be sure to attend the Alameda County Fair…”
Examples and emotions: People in business are prone to generalize and hid their emotions. Often that’s a good business decision. But when you’re trying to communicate, it comes off as bland and lifeless. Instead, give real-world examples of how people can use your product or service, or share some emotion component of the effort to bring that product or service to them.

Here’s that FAME Formula downloadable worksheet.

posted by Jon Greer
July 24, 2008 @ 7:00 am

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