Personal ads have traditionally been placed in print periodicals such as newspapers and magazines; Internet personals, on the other hand have a shorter history, in keeping with the recent development and subsequent rapid explosion of the internet as media. While much research has been devoted to the study of print ads, very little linguistic analysis has been conducted on Internet personals, even though the two kinds of ads differ from each other in some key ways. The most important difference between the two is that on the Internet space is not at a premium and therefore the subject has a lot more space in which to describe himself or herself. One might expect, because there is considerably less space constraint on the amount of information given and because the internet personal is a fairly new medium, that these ads would be much less formulaic than the older print ads. And this is true. However, a closer look at these ads reveals that there is an underlying similarity among most of these ads, and they too are somewhat formulaic in their form and content. Indeed, it seems that this particular genre follows fairly well-established conventions in how they are written, what their content is, and the sort of message they are trying to get across (in other words their syntax, semantics, and pragmatics). This talk will outline the linguistics regularities discovered among 232 personal ads written by men and women in the Lafayette area. Additionally, key differences between the ads written by men and the ads written by women will pointed out in an attempt to discern just how these subjects “sell” themselves and how they describe what they are attempting to “buy” in these advertisements.