Writers must indicate to their readers what to pay attention to, what is important. Several techniques are available to them, including the use of punctuation for emphasis, and placement of information in different parts of the clauses and sentences of the text. To examine how this is done, a sample of written advertisements was gathered from three national magazines. Meanings which were "newsworthy" and likely to be highlighted were predicted based on an examination of the social interactions which these ads encoded. Then the advertisements were examined for how and where these newsworthy meanings were expressed. This examination showed that the newsworthy meanings typically occurred at the ends of the component punctuated sentences. In Hallidayan terms, they were regularly presented in the unmarked place of New information in the Rhemes. Of course the advertisements contained many "sentence fragments". In the body of the advertisements, these fragments seemed to achieve two purposes. First, they isolated one chunk of information and presented it as an independent unit (the sentence fragment). Second, they created a new end for the previous information unit (the previous punctuated sentence) and so created a second unmarked focus of information. Both effects of the use of fragments were seen to be relevant to the interpretation of the advertisements. Themes in the Hallidayan sense were rarely punctuated as separate sentences and expressed topics for the message in the following sentence when they were so punctuated.