When you receive a letter from a friend you want the letter to mirror the exact thoughts and feeling of your friend at the moment he wrote it. You prefer sincerity to an artificial effort to disguise or color his sentiments. Just so with a newspaper article, a magazine tale, a novel or an advertisement. Honesty and spontaneity must be there before the attention of a reader will be thoroughly captured.

This is the fundamental virtue of an advertisement. When it is not spontaneous it is labored and artificial, therefore ineffective and when it is not natural it is mechanical and unattractive. An honest outright effort that rides rough over the rules of spelling and grammar is more effective by far than the elegant production, faultless in grammar and expression, but pretentious and artificial in effect.

Suppose you are advertising—say spring over-coats. Hold up the coat. Look it over. Feel its texture, its linings — run your hands in its pockets and note its cut and finish. And its price is very low. All these points are flashed on your mind and you make mental notes. You cross-question the salesmen about the styles of spring overcoats-which are likely to be popular. You go back to your desk full of overcoat information, and bursting with this intelligence, you proceed to fix up an ad on spring overcoats.

This information will help a lot in organizing the content that you will include in your poster, brochure or flyer. You could consider talking about the spring coat in your marketing material as you would in a conversation with a customer. Provide them with the details quickly and easily and if he likes to laugh, a short joke or story may help you in your sale. Short, snappy, and catchy sentences are the sentences that strike readers. Thus, clean, artistic outline cuts, full of action to harmonize with the text, should be used. Pictures would also help enhance the material. A picture of a well dressed man wearing the coat can help to wonderfully emphasize the points you desire to bring out.

Thus, a neat cut, complete selling scheme has advantage over over-designed ones. From start to finish it is carefully thought and carried out. How much better is it than the usual whitewash of advertising which simply brings people in only to be disgusted with the unpreparedness of things? So, to be a successful business man, make sure you use ads that are neat, fresh and not overlarge with crisp, convincing text.