The Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology will confer an honorary degree on Raila Odinga in December. That, as the justification goes, is because of his exemplary work.

Word, word, word, word, word, punctuation mark. This is how we read. Sometimes there are more words, or fewer. Occasionally additional marks—commas, em-dashes—enter the mix. But that’s pretty much how ...

The muse gets all the press, but here’s a fact: Good writing involves obsessing over punctuation marks. It’s 1 a.m., you’ve got a 5,000-word piece due the next day, and for the last twenty minutes you ...