The article deals with the syntactic organization and punctuation in advertising texts at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The research material were advertising texts and advertisements placed in regional press (“Ural life”, “Irbit fair leaf”, etc.). During the period under review, print advertising is at the stage of formation and has not yet emerged as an independent genre. Modern advertising texts are primarily focused on attracting attention. They should be readable by a potential buyer without any difficulty, therefore, their syntax, punctuation, font and illustrative design should contribute to ease of perception and understanding of the text. In the considered material, the opposite situation is observed. With regard to its genre, advertising at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries is close to announcements and aims to convey important information. The desire of the seller/manufacturer to tell as much as possible about their product to the buyer results in complexity of the text. Organization of advertising text at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries involves an active use of abbreviations, complex syntactic constructions as well as unusual design elements (for example, a line break). Syntactic organization of the text at the given period can become an indicator of a gradual transition from the announcement genre to the ad genre: the texts most rich in information, still drifting towards the announcement genre, have complex punctuation and syntactic organization, while texts focused on the emotional response of the reader (a new stage in the development of the ad genre), on the contrary, are distinguished by considerable simplifications.