Writing Analysis Paragraph

 Formal writing can vary depending on the topic on hand. In general formal writing is a more difficult read, using longer sentences, and precise but sometimes unknown terms. The article written in the Journal of Sports Economics, “Political Correctness, Selection Bias, and the NCAA Basketball Tournament”, Paul & Wilson, 2015, uses less scientific terms and formulas and more theoretical terms and program based language. This language is used since the audience for this journal is more likely to be those interested in either the economics, sociology or theoretical calculations behind sports rather than experimental scientists. The average words per sentence was 24, which is considered to be a complex sentence, and the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease was 37.4. This means the article is meant to be read by at least university students. Jargon terms such as “running up the score” (203) are put in quotation marks, and are the main reasoning behind the long sentences as they use subordinate clauses to include definitions and/or explanations of these terms. Although this article was found using a scientific article database, the format of the article is not in the typical IMRAD format, at least for headings. The article does include several of the sections of IMRAD including an introduction and statistical methods section, but they are not split up by paragraphs or headings, and the only headings are Abstract, Economic Rationale Behind Tournament Selection, Regression Results, and Conclusion. Another notable observation is the use of “We” and the repetition of “we believe”, “we wish” and “we consider.” The first person writing style in combination with the statistical methods effectively relates back to the idea of human and computer error and biases in the topic of selecting teams for the NCAA basketball tournament.