He comes slowly up the parade ground on his white charger, helmet
    and eagle flashing in the sunshine, sitting his horse as if he lived
    in the saddle, his face turned to his men as he passes by.

    “Morgen, meine Kinder.”  His salutation rings out at intervals in the
    clear morning air.  And back from the ranks in chorus comes the
    response:  “Morgen, Majestaet.”

And as he rides on, master of a million men, the most powerful figure in Europe, reviewing his troops on the peaceful parade ground at Potsdam, one wonders whether the day will ever come when he will ride down those ranks on another errand, and when that cheerful response of the soldiers will have in it the ancient ring of doom—­“Te morituri salutamus.”

    For answer, let us look at this challenging figure on the white
    charger.  What is he?  What has he done?

By the three short sentences in the first paragraph beginning “Officers gallop,” the author depicts the rapid movement of the soldiers.  By the next three short sentences in the same paragraph beginning, “There is a sudden stillness,” he produces an impression of suspense.  To picture the Kaiser coming up “slowly,” he uses a long, leisurely sentence.  The salutations “ring out” in short, crisp sentences.  The more serious, impressive thought of the possibility of war finds fitting expression in the long, 64-word sentence, ending with the sonorous—­“ring of doom,” “Te morituri salutamus.”

The transition between the introduction and the body of the sketch is accomplished by the last paragraph consisting of three short sentences, in marked contrast with the climactic effect with which the description closed.

PARAGRAPHS.  The paragraph is a device that aids a writer to convey to readers his thoughts combined in the same groups in which they are arranged in his own mind.  Since a small group of thoughts is more easily grasped than a large one, paragraphs in journalistic writing are usually considerably shorter than those of ordinary English prose.  In the narrow newspaper column, there is room for only five or six words to a line.  A paragraph of 250 words, which is the average length of the literary paragraph, fills between forty and fifty lines of a newspaper column.  Such paragraphs seem heavy and uninviting.  Moreover, the casual reader cannot readily comprehend and combine the various thoughts in so large a group of sentences.  Although there is no standard column width for magazines, the number of words in a line does not usually exceed eight.  A paragraph of 250 words that occupies 30 eight-word lines seems less attractive than one of half that length.  The normal paragraph in journalistic writing seldom exceeds 100 words and not infrequently is much shorter.  As such a paragraph contains not more than four or five sentences, the general reading public has little difficulty in comprehending it.