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Sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Newseum Institute, the Gallup survey assessed the sentiments of college students on the state of their First Amendment freedoms. The findings suggest that while the core principles of the First Amendment are well-rooted in society, what those rights mean is up for debate in an era of changing media habits, new forms of technology-mediated conversation, and important national debates on race and diversity.

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Propaganda Techniques - Whose Voice Guides Your Choice.ppt

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Other people probably just find line breaks more efficient. An American University study of college students' texting and instant messaging habits found they only used sentence-final punctuation 39 percent of the time in texts and 45 percent of the time in online chats. The percentages were even lower for "transmission-final punctuation": 29 percent for texts and 35 percent for IMs. The same is likely true of Twitter, where the 140-character limit has made most punctuation seem dispensable.

"In the world of texting and IMing ... the default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all," Liberman wrote me. "In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer, plausibly enough, is something like 'This is final, this is the end of the discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.'"

It's a remarkable innovation. The period was one of the first punctuation marks to enter written language as a way to indicate a pause, back when writing was used primarily as a record of (and script for) speech. Over time, as the written word gained autonomy from the spoken word, punctuation became a way to structure a text according to its own unique hierarchy and logic. While punctuation could still be used to create or suggest the rhythms of speech, only the exclamation point and question mark indicated anything like what an orator would call "tone."

"Explicit representations of the emotional state of the person doing the writing are fairly rare," said Keith Houston, author of Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. Writers, linguists, and philosophers have occasionally tried to invent new punctuation marks to ease the difficulty of inflecting tone in writing. The "irony mark," in particular, has been proposed many times. But none of these efforts has been successful.

Now, however, technology has led us to use written language more like speech-that is, in a real-time, back-and-forth between two or more people. "[P]eople are communicating like they are talking, but encoding that talk in writing," Clay Shirky recently told Slate. This might help explain the rise of the line break: It allows people to more accurately emulate in writing the rhythm of speech. It has also confronted people with the problem of tone in writing, and they're trying to solve it with the familiar punctuation marks that the line break largely displaced.

It's not just the period. Nearly everyone has struggled to figure out whether or not a received message is sarcastic. So people began using exclamation points almost as sincerity markers: "I really mean the sentence I just concluded!" (This is especially true of exclamation points used in sequence: "Are you being sarcastic?" "No!!!!!") And as problems of tone kept arising on text and instant message, people turned to other punctuation marks on their keyboards rather than inventing new ones. The question mark has similarly outgrown its traditional purpose. I notice it more and more as a way to temper straightforward statements that might otherwise seem cocky, as in "I'm pretty sure he likes me?" The ellipsis, as Slate noted, has come to serve a whole range of purposes. I often see people using it as a passive-aggressive alternative to the period's outright hostility-an invitation to the offender to guess at his mistake and remedy it. ("No." shuts down the conversation; "No..." allows it to continue.)

Medial punctuation, like the comma and parentheses, has yet to take on emotional significance (at least as far as I've observed). And these newfangled, emotional uses of terminal punctuation haven't crossed over into more traditional, thoughtful writing. (I have used the period throughout this story, and I'm in a perfectly pleasant mood.) Perhaps one day it will, though, and our descendants will wonder why everyone used to be so angry. For posterity's sake, then, let my author bio be clear:
Ben Crair is a story editor at The New Republic!

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Other people probably just find line breaks more efficient. An American University study of college students' texting and instant messaging habits found they only used sentence-final punctuation 39 percent of the time in texts and 45 percent of the time in online chats.

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VIDEO: Stalin, the Soviet Union, and WWII

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VIDEO: Stalin, the Soviet Union, and WWII

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Untold History: Stalin, the Soviet Union and WWII

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Peter Kuznick (co-author with Oliver Stone of Showtime's Untold History of the United States): Dealing with the role of the Soviet Union in WWII was the most sensitive and complicated issue faced by the series

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As a writer and teacher, I try to learn something about the craft every day. A gold coin of inspiration may come in my reading, in a conversation with another writer or even in the process of revising this essay.

I learned an important lesson, somewhat unwittingly, on July 19, 1975, while watching an interview with two of my favorite writers, William F. Buckley Jr. and Tom Wolfe. Mr. Wolfe was making fun of an art critic who had begun an essay with the sentence "Art and ideas are one."

"Now, I must give him credit for this," said Mr. Wolfe. "If you ever have a preposterous statement to make ... say it in five words or less, because we're always used to five-word sentences as being the gospel truth."

The five-word sentence as the gospel truth.

Granted, Mr. Wolfe was being a little cynical, but the truth of what he was saying still applies. Express your most powerful thought in the shortest sentence.

In a 2006 article in The St. Petersburg Times, the writer Thomas French showed off this move, describing the memorable life and influential tenure in a Tampa zoo of a chimpanzee named Herman.

"Altogether," wrote Mr. French, "he lived at Lowry Park Zoo for 35 years. He lasted there longer than any other creature and longer than any of the humans. Each of the 1,800 animals at the zoo is assigned a number. His was 00001."

In an interview, Mr. French explained that the most telling detail in Herman's story was that number: 00001. Herman was Elvis, No. 1, the primal primate, Adam in this garden of captives.

Finding that number - with all those zeros - is good reporting; how Mr. French decided to use it is more revealing. He could have listed it in a catalog of details. Instead, to deliver it full force, he placed the magic number at the end of a paragraph at the end of a section in the story's shortest sentence. "His was 00001."

Using short sentences to their full effect is a centuries-old strategy, found in opinion writing, fiction and nonfiction, poetry and plays. It works in a formal speech or in a handwritten letter. Shakespeare had a messenger deliver the news to Macbeth in six words: "The Queen, my lord, is dead," a message that could fit easily inside a 140-character tweet.

A familiar and effective place for the short sentence is at the end of a long paragraph. Here is the critic Greil Marcus riffing on the poetry of the beat poet Allen Ginsberg:

SIN! SIN! SIN! Ginsberg shouted again and again, in scores of other words - single words, elaborate travelogues, sexual fantasies, the American pastoral as it passed by under his eye on the highway, unable to outrun the American berserk in Vietnam. He was there, "lone man from the void, riding a bus/hypnotized by red tail lights on the straight/space road ahead," to judge the country. And he was there to save it.

Let's measure the economy of that final sentence, an efficiency that brings with it the ring of truth: Seven words, all of one syllable. Twenty-one letters. That's three letters per word.

There are times when these truth-bearing (truth-baring!) sentences come in a cluster, heightening the drama. The sentences also can appear as a stand-alone paragraph, swimming in white space. George Orwell plays with these techniques in "Animal Farm":

It was a pig walking on his hind legs.

Yes, it was Squealer ... And finally there was a tremendous baying of dogs and a shrill crowing from the black cockerel, and out came Napoleon himself, majestically upright, casting haughty glances from side to side, and with his dogs gambolling round him.

He carried a whip in his trotter.

A long sequence of short sentences slows the reader down, each period acting as a stop sign. That slow pace can bring clarity, create suspense or magnify emotion, but can soon become tedious. It turns out that the short sentence gains power from its proximity to longer sentences, as Orwell demonstrates with that final image of the whip appearing after a sentence that stretches to 38 words.

Another British dystopian, Anthony Burgess, might have learned this trick from Orwell. In the last paragraph of "A Clockwork Orange," his savage teenage narrator is about to be liberated from the re-programming designed to suppress his violent impulses. Listening to his beloved Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, he expresses his joy via an invented gang-slang of the future:

Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like very light and mysterious nogas, carving the whole litso of the creeching world with my cut-throat britva. And there was the slow movement and the lovely last singing movement still to come. I was cured all right.

Notice the metrical echoes in that final sentence: five words. All of one syllable. None longer than five letters. And with this added benefit: It comes not just at the end of a passage or a chapter, but as the last chilling words of the novel.

What makes a short sentence short is determined by the sentences around it. In the land of 40-word sentences, the 20-word sentence bears a special power. The following passage ends the historical novel "Libra" by Don DeLillo and describes the burial of John F. Kennedy's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. You will notice that all the sentences are relatively short, allowing the emotional tension to build. The woman in question is Oswald's mother:

Marguerite felt a weakness in her legs. The wind made the canopy snap. She felt hollow in her body and heart. But even as they led her from the grave she heard the name Lee Harvey Oswald spoken by two boys standing fifty feet away, here to grab some clods of souvenir earth. Lee Harvey Oswald. Saying it like a secret they'd keep forever. She saw the first dusty car drive off, just silhouetted heads in windows. She walked with the policemen up to the second car, where the funeral director stood under a black umbrella, holding open the door. Lee Harvey Oswald. No matter what happened, how hard they schemed against her, this was the one thing they could not take away - the truth and lasting power of his name. It belonged to her now, and to history.

Consider the variety of lengths in this excerpt: 7, 6, 8, 32, 3, 8, 13, 23, 3, 28, 8. The two shortest verbless sentences of three words (Lee Harvey Oswald) appear immediately after two of the longer sentences. That change of pace, that abruptness, that slamming on of brakes, carries significant meaning as does that final truth bearing/baring sentence: "It belonged to her now, and to history."

I thank Tom Wolfe for that 1975 lesson on the disproportional power of the short sentence. It stuck. I owe it to him to restore his original context, that writers can use it to give even preposterous statements the ring of truth. The bigot can use it to foment hate. The propagandist can slap it on a bumper sticker. But for the writer with good intent, the short sentence proves a reliable method for delivering the practical truth. With punch.
Roy Peter Clark teaches writing at the Poynter Institute. He is the author of "Writing Tools" and "How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times."

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As a writer and teacher, I try to learn something about the craft every day. A gold coin of inspiration may come in my reading, in a conversation with another writer or even in the process of revising this essay.

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In 1995, more than twenty years after his irreverent illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, the beloved British cartoonist Ralph Steadman put his singular twist on a very different kind of literary beast, one of the most controversial books ever published. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first American publication of George Orwell's masterpiece, which by that point had sold millions of copies around the world in more than seventy languages, Steadman illustrated a special edition titled Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (public library), featuring 100 of his unmistakable full-color and halftone illustrations.

Accompanying Steadman's illustrations is Orwell's proposed but unpublished preface to the original edition, titled "The Freedom of the Press" - a critique of how the media's fear of public opinion ends up drowning out the central responsibility of journalism. Though aimed at European publishers' self-censorship regarding Animal Farm at the time, Orwell's words ring with astounding prescience and timeliness in our present era of people-pleasing "content" that passes for journalism:

The chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of ... any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face.

Alas, this exquisite edition is no longer in print, but I was able to track down a surviving copy and offer a taste of Steadman's genius for our shared delight.

Also included is Orwell's preface to the 1947 Ukrainian edition, equally timely today for obvious geopolitical reasons. In it, he writes:

I understood, more clearly than ever, the negative influence of the Soviet myth upon the western Socialist movement.

And here I must pause to describe my attitude to the Soviet régime.

I have never visited Russia and my knowledge of it consists only of what can be learned by reading books and newspapers. Even if I had the power, I would not wish to interfere in Soviet domestic affairs: I would not condemn Stalin and his associates merely for their barbaric and undemocratic methods. It is quite possible that, even with the best intentions, they could not have acted otherwise under the conditions prevailing there.

But on the other hand it was of the utmost importance to me that people in Western Europe should see the Soviet régime for what it really was...

I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.

Orwell concludes with a note on his often misconstrued intent with the book's ultimate message:

I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure. But I should like to emphasize two points: first, that although the various episodes are taken from the actual history of the Russian Revolution, they are dealt with schematically and their chronological order is changed; this was necessary for the symmetry of the story. The second point has been missed by most critics, possibly because I did not emphasize it sufficiently. A number of readers may finish the book with the impression that it ends in the complete reconciliation of the pigs and the humans. That was not my intention; on the contrary I meant it to end on a loud note of discord, for I wrote it immediately after the Teheran Conference which everybody thought had established the best possible relations between the USSR and the West. I personally did not believe that such good relations would last long; and, as events have shown, I wasn't far wrong.

Steadman's Animal Farm: A Fairy Story is spectacular in its entirety, should you be so fortunate to snag a used copy. Complement it with his illustrated edition of Alice in Wonderland and his inkblot dog drawings, then be sure to take a closer look at Orwell's "The Freedom of the Press."

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George Orwell's Animal Farm Illustrated by Ralph Steadman

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In 1995, more than twenty years after his irreverent illustrations for Alice in Wonderland , the beloved British cartoonist Ralph Steadman put his singular twist on a very different kind of literary beast, one of the most controversial books ever published.

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No, color film did not exist in 1909, but chemist-turned-photojournalist Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) had pioneered a revolutionary method to document pre-Revolution Russian Empire and its multicultural surroundings. Using color-filtered plates of glass, he captured a red, a blue and a green channel of each of rivers, railroads, villages, churches of olde. Even more fascinatingly, we can look 100 years back in time on the faces of real peasants, factory workers, noblemen, soldiers, sailors and botanists. Peek into the past with these amazing scenes from 1909 through 1912, courtesy of the Library of Congress. The borders give it an extra magical touch, don't they?

Photo credit: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Peasant girls. Courtesy Library of Congress

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100-Year-Old Color Photos from the Russian Empire

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No, color film did not exist in 1909, but chemist-turned-photojournalist Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) had pioneered a revolutionary method to document pre-Revolution Russian Empire and its multicultural surroundings. Using color-filtered plates of glass, he captured a red, a blue and a green channel of each of rivers, railroads, villages, churches of olde.

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Politics and the English Language by Orwell

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Politics and the English Language by Orwell

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The Ukrainian translation of Animal Farm was intended for Ukrainians living in the camps for Displaced Persons in Germany under British and American administration after World War II.

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Capitalism & Socialism  - John Green Video

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Capitalism & Socialism  - John Green Video

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Capitalism and Socialism: Crash Course World History #33