academic-registerlisted

# Academic register — MBS4820 ## The core distinction: descriptive vs critical Almost every mark lost on writing quality traces to one habit — describing what sources say instead of doing something with them. | Descriptive (Pass) | Critical (Distinction) | |---|---| | "Porter (1980) identifies five forces." | "Porter's (1980) framework treats industry structure as stable, which understates how quickly platform entrants have reshaped last-mile economics." | | "The market is growing rapidly." | "Growth of X% annually (Source, 2025) outpaces incumbent capacity expansion of Y% (Source, 2024), leaving an addressable gap of roughly Z parcels per day." | | "Several authors have studied this." | "Autio and Zander (2016) attribute this to institutional voids; Sarasvathy (2001) locates it in founder logic instead. The distinction matters here because…" | | "FedEx is a large logistics company." | "FedEx's scale advantage in intercontinental air freight does not transfer to intra-GCC ground density, where its cost per drop is structurally higher than a regional operator's." | Every paragraph should either advance an argument or be cut. ## Paragraph architecture Build each paragraph on this spine: 1. **Claim** — the point, stated first. One sentence. 2. **Evidence** — cited data or literature supporting it. 3. **Analysis** — what the evidence means, why it holds, where it is contestable. 4. **Link** — how this bears on the venture or the next point. The most common failure is a pa