‘Politics’ Articles at WOW Fellowship Blog

Post 2: What journalism taught me about political writing

In Opinion Writing, Professor Eileen McNamara’s journalism class, we read George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language. Professor McNamara instructed us to use Orwell’s rules for writing and language at the end of the essay to rewrite a dense piece of prose. I chose to rewrite an excerpt from Chris Atton’s Alternative Media, which I had read for an English course the previous semester.

When I read Alternative Media the first time, which happened to be during my first semester of college, I struggled to understand what Atton was saying. I worried that everyone else was getting it but me and that I was doing something wrong. When I revisited the piece after reading Orwell’s essay, however, I saw that I wasn’t dumb for needing to reread Atton’s sentences multiple times or for finding myself at the end of a paragraph without any understanding of what I had just read. Rather, I realized the style of writing was excessively wordy, full of pretentious diction, and overall inaccessible.

Professor McNamara’s assignment taught me that knowing big, fancy words and being able to construct long, complex sentences don’t make you a good writer. You aren’t smarter for knowing industry jargon and acronyms off the top of your head, or for trying to force a stale metaphor into a piece of writing. The point of writing is to communicate your ideas, and if you want people to listen, you have to present them in an accessible manner.

Part of RepresentWomen’s work is advocacy. We try to convince people that women’s representation matters and that the way to increase it is through major reforms to rules and systems. With a topic like electoral reform, it can be easy to make content inaccessible. Lacking proper explanation, terms such as ranked choice voting, multi-member districting, and proportional representation can seem foreign and complicated. Orwell wrote in his essay, “In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing.” Yet, political writing is so often an attempt to persuade the reader to join one side or another. But how can you change someone’s mind if they don’t understand what you’re saying?

I try to keep Orwell’s rules in mind as I write and edit content for RepresentWomen. My favorite rules are: “Never use a long word where a short one will do”; “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out”; and “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” Rules like these are crucial to ensuring that all the research my coworkers do is being heard and absorbed by an audience, and all of our hard work is not going to waste.

I hope my changed approach to writing will help RepresentWomen’s ideas reach more people. For example, one of the biggest criticisms of ranked-choice voting is that it is hard for people to understand. In a study done in 2009, however, when Minneapolis first used ranked-choice voting, 95 percent of Minneapolis voters said they found the system easy to understand. Yet, this perception that people struggle to understand ranked-choice voting persists because it can so easily be explained badly.

Ranked choice voting has the potential to make our elections more democratic by increasing the number of women and people of color representing the American electorate. What words you use to describe it determines whether you get people on your side. This is true for all types of advocacy, in addition to the work RepresentWomen does.

Below are photos of me and my coworkers with Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley. We were lucky enough to run into them on Capitol Hill during an Ignite conference. These newly-elected congresswomen are powerful speakers (Congresswoman Pressley’s speech was the highlight of the conference for many), choosing words that make them accessible to all of their constituents, not just the highly educated and political elite.

Post 1: Summer at RepresentWomen

The organization I am working at this summer is a nonprofit called RepresentWomen. A branch of FairVote, this group does advocacy and research focused on systemic reforms that will help more women get elected to public office. I chose this field because I believe that for the United States to be a representative democracy, its government must reflect the experiences, demographics, and values of all of its people.

RepresentWomen is addressing the fact that women, and especially women of color, are underrepresented at all levels of U.S. government. Their strategy is to focus on rules and systems reforms, such as the implementation of ranked choice voting, gender quotas, and multi-member districts. RepresentWomen also does research, like the Gender Parity Index (GPI) and International Report, to track the progress of women’s representation and to figure out which reforms are most effective.

So far, I have taken on the tasks of updating and redesigning the “Women’s Representation by the Numbers” graphic and scaling it for different social media:

I also make other graphics occasionally, such as for the RepresentWomen Twitter page and for a summary/handout I compiled on the International Report.

I also post from the RepresentWomen Twitter account when I am in the office.

I also helped Cynthia, my boss, write and edit a chapter she will be contributing to a book. I wrote about the disadvantages women face when running for office that stem from sexism in the media and in campaign finance.

In celebration of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, RepresentWomen is helping run this year’s Seneca Falls Revisited, which will feature a number of fascinating speakers and guests. I was assigned to write blog posts about a number of these individuals and will be interviewing as many of them as possible. They will be released online leading up to the convention. I have also been helping to update some of the research, including in the International Report, a report of multi-member districts, and soon the GPI.

I will be working on creating audio content in the form of a podcast, largely by interviewing members of RepresentWomen’s board, but also others. For example, I am in the process of setting up an interview with the hosts of Pantsuit Politics. I also will hopefully have the opportunity to use my editing skills to create video content.

I think my work will help further RepresentWomen’s mission by turning their messages into content that people can understand. Everyone takes in information differently, and the more ways I can show people that these reforms to our electoral systems are crucial to the United States being a representative democracy, the more people will support RepresentWomen’s cause. Progress very broadly looks like more women in government, but before we can get there we have to see districts adopting ranked choice voting, political parties and PACs changing their recruitment and funding strategies, and the introduction of gender quotas into U.S. politics. There is a lot that needs to be done, but that also means there are a lot of possible solutions at hand.

Leaving Kiev: Final Blog Post with the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine

I would not have thought that eight weeks could have gone by so quickly.

I think the experience went above and beyond in fulfilling the learning goals I set at the beginning. Everything, from my tasks in the office to living in Kiev, contributed toward fulfilling those goals. One such goal was to gain professional experience. I was, and still am, interested in working for the U.S. government in some capacity, preferably doing something involving nuclear issues and Eastern Europe, and this internship was excellent. It gave me the opportunity to work for a State Department program and meet U.S. government officials. Through talking with colleagues, I learned how different working for the U.S. government was from working for a Ukrainian government organization, in terms of transparency.

Another of my learning goals was to learn about Eastern Europe. I talked to colleagues at lunch about all sorts of things from Russia’s meddling in the Crimea to the large amount of corruption in the Kiev’s city government. I sampled borsht and vareniki (dumplings) and salo (the national dish, which is pretty much lard), which are cornerstones of Ukrainian cuisine. I had the opportunity to practice speaking Russian, but at work my colleagues spoke very impressive English, so there were no communication problems. Having the opportunity to travel to Moldova offered a unique chance to travel to another former Soviet republic and to learn about Transnistria (Moldova’s eastern territory has declared its independence, but no country recognizes it). This is an excellent Economist article about Transnistria and other similar conflict zones in former Soviet republics. I ended the summer with a much deeper understanding of Ukrainian culture and politics. I won’t forget the excellent summer I spent there or the kindness of the friends I made. Ukraine in the world today

The summer has helped to further cement my interests in nonproliferation and the former Soviet Union, and I hope to continue to interweave those interests with my studies at Brandeis and future internships and jobs. To someone with similar interests, I would say, be willing to take risks. If you are really interested in certain issues, find an organization that deals with them and contact the organization. Even if there is not internship program, inquire about a possible internship. There are a lot of other people interested in international relations-related careers, so I think it is important to build up an impressive and unique resume, something to make you stand out.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to spend the summer in Ukraine. I returned to the US with so many stories and experiences that I will always treasure.

Jennifer Ginsburg, ’14