When selling through advertising, you're faced with two options, both of which you will probably use frequently. Those options are display and classified advertising. We won't deal here with radio and television copy writing because it is not something many of you will be using until you have developed a great deal of mail order experience. Once you're dealing with that sort of capital investment, you'll probably have an intimate understanding of the fact that expert help is essential to the successful launch of any campaign, and frankly, electronic media are not our field of experience. Classified ad copy writing is a very exacting craft, not an art in the way that display advertising is. It involves following a few simple guidelines and requires little skill. That's why daily newspapers hire school and college students to take orders - and write - for their classified section over the telephone. The first point worth noting is that classified ads are sold by the word or by the line. This has a bearing on how you write your ads, because if the ad is sold by the word, you're not going to write an ad that has a bunch of "a's" and "the's" in it. But at the same time, if it's sold by the line, it will be worth your while to include these words in the ad, as they'll appeal to the better educated segment of the market. So an ad in at so much a line might read: "The hottest thing in years. This is a household wonder you'll cherish for years." The same ad at so much a word will read: "Hottest recent development. Cherish this household innovation for generations." Both are about