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 advertisingsay 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...