er 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.

The beginning of the paragraph, like the beginning of the sentence, is
the part that catches the eye. Significant ideas that need to be
impressed upon the mind of the reader belong at the b