America's Pastime and Plain Style

Baseball is considered America’s national pastime. People of all races, cultures, social classes, and ages enjoy watching baseball and many other sports. This means that publications in sports media are written in plain language to allow for accessibility by ALL people. As difficult as it may be to ensure that an article can be read and understood by everyone, plain style strategies can be used to aid in the task. Many of the articles that I have looked through eliminate the use of prepositional phrases or sentence combining strategies and follow the “who’s kicking whom” strategy. Sentences get straight to the point and leave little up to interpretation.

            The article that I chose was written following an interview with baseball stars Christian Yelich and Cody Bellinger. This interview took place in a local bar and followed Yelich and Bellinger competing in different games such as cornhole, skee-ball, ping-pong, and even beer chugging. Part of the article was simply a transcription of the interview and the other part gave information about the setting of the interview, questions posed to the athletes, and short summaries of the athletes. The article doesn’t include any extra information than one would need to understand the situation. A lot of direct quotes and dialogue were included in the article. This helps the reader get information straight from the horse’s mouth, it isn’t an interpretation of what the author thinks. The information given is from the athlete about himself, no room for argument.

            

          Plain language strategies used in sports journalism include the use of active voice, simple sentence and paragraph structure and word choice, and a conversational tone. This again brings up the strategy of “who is kicking whom.” This strategy keeps writing in the active voice and simplifies and shortens sentences. In plain style, the shorter a sentence can be the better. Most sentences in my article only had a handful of words and the paragraphs are only a few sentences each. Sports articles typically feel very conversational. This one in particular is about a casual interview that happened in a bar, so both the questions and answers are less formal. Journalists write this way to attract interest to their article by all types of people. I know from personal experience that I am attracted to reading an article by the first couple of sentences and am usually turned off if it is too long and wordy. Authors need to keep their writing interesting but also short and to the point.

          

          Journalists, especially those covering sports, use plain language to appeal to as many readers as they can. They realize that a variety of people may be interested in their chosen topics, and their articles must be accessible to all of them. Plain language strategies keep readability scores high and allow for all people to engage in sports media.

Kelsie K.