Do Direct Quotes in Copy Matter?
Consider how these lines differ in form but not in core content:
Direct quote, first-person
“I was terrified when I heard the diagnosis,” Maria said.
Direct quote, second-person
“You never expect to hear words like that about your own child,” she said.
Direct quote, third-person
“He kept asking if he was going to be okay,” she explained.
Indirect speech
Maria said that she was terrified when she heard the diagnosis.
Narrative description
Maria was terrified when she heard the diagnosis.
Different pronouns used, different grammatical structures, quotation marks versus not. Do any of these distinctions matter to the giving decision? New research across 68,000 crowd funding campaigns across 3 countries found that direct, verbatim quotes are the only variation that moves the fundraising needle.
The mechanism is not emotion or the pronoun choice invoked. It’s the quotation marks that triggers the reader to simulate a voice and, without any conscious effort, feel closer to the speaker. This decreases the psychological distance between the beneficiary and the donor and that’s what increases giving.
A direct quote—regardless of pronoun—creates proximity. Indirect speech, despite carrying identical information, does not.
But this uptick in response is not uniform.
- Genuinely (vs contrived) urgency and concrete situations are what trigger the effect, while more abstract or low-stakes causes largely neutralize it.
- And the effect also differs across types of people. Those who more naturally “hear” what they read and visualize scenes are more likely to be moved by the direct quotes. The more analytical, less visual donor will be better served by clear causality (Do X, Get Y outcome), and efficient narrative rather than a dependence on voice simulation they don’t experience.
The practical guidance is almost embarrassingly simple:
- use real, concise, verbatim quotes in contexts where the situation is urgent enough for proximity to matter;
- avoid indirect speech entirely;
- and tailor the presence or prominence of quoted material to the donor traits that determine whether the mechanism will fire – namely those high in trait Openness. (you can have this trait detail on your file for a paltry $0.15/name)
Kevin
3 responses to “Do Direct Quotes in Copy Matter?”
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Hi Kevin, Love DonorVoice been following for years, appreciate this affirming research, thank you. But I’m also an English professor. So first-second-or-third person is not about what’s inside the quotes, it’s about the perspective of the narrative. So:
Direct quote, first-person should be:
“I was terrified when I heard the diagnosis,” I said. (the narrative voice is the “I”).
Direct quote, second-person is always talking directly to “you’ as reader, so:
“I was terrified when I heard the diagnosis,” YOU said. Then you walked further into the house…
And then third person narration is when the narrative voice is put in “he” or “she” whether we see the inner life of those characters or not.
Hi Yvonne, thank you for the long time readership, the kind words, and you providing the craft lens here. You are right that “first, second, third person” often refers to the narrative point of view of the surrounding prose.
In this post, though, I was using the terms in the narrower grammatical sense to label the pronouns inside the quoted speech itself. So a line like “I was terrified…” is first-person dialogue because the speaker is referring to themselves as “I,” even if the narration around it remains in third person (“Maria said…”). Likewise, a quote that uses “you” is second-person dialogue, whether it is addressing a specific person or using the generic “you,” and a quote that uses “he/she/they” is third-person dialogue. Those layers can vary independently as a story can be narrated in third person while a character speaks in first person, and vice versa.
The reason I set it up that way was to hold the core meaning constant, then vary pronouns and quoted versus non-quoted structure, so readers could track what the research is pointing to about quotation marks and perceived closeness.
To be more unambiguous i could call them “direct quote with first-person pronouns,” etc., to make clear I am talking about dialogue rather than narrative POV. Thanks again for the thoughtful comment
Kevin, appreciate the thoughtful response–pls keep writing and doing research for those of us in the trenches without much research capacity but caring a lot about best practices and good results. All the best.