Gilda Geist’s Articles at WOW Fellowship Blog

Post 3: Reflecting on RepresentWomen

I helped write content for RepresentWomen during my time there as an intern. I wrote articles that went on the website and the Medium blog, and I also promoted them on social media. I think that my articles helped get RepresentWomen’s messages across by making arguments for increased women’s representation, providing information about fair voting systems, and helping people understand why these reforms are important and relevant to their own lives.

I also got an article published in The Fulcrum, a new media outlet that focuses on reporting on democracy reforms. The article will go live on August 6, and is about the Fair Representation Act. The piece will hopefully get more people on board with the legislation by explaining how it will increase women’s representation.

I wrote articles for the Civically Re-engaged Women blog as well, to promote their Seneca Falls Revisited Conference. This event will commemorate the first women’s rights convention in the United States and bring together women leaders from across the country to discuss women’s participation in society and politics.

Hopefully my writing impacts the organization by getting people’s attention and showing them why what RepresentWomen stands for is important. Words have power, and when used correctly, they can get people to care about and mobilize around an issue.

I learned that in the world of social justice work, organizations can have a lot of admirable ambition but not always have the capacity to achieve everything they want to. They instead have to make priorities. If I hear about a project that’s lower priority for the organization but is of interest to me, I can try to be proactive by asking how I can help or getting started on it on my own.

For example, sometimes I would hear about an idea for an article or blog post during a meeting, and then before I could get specific guidelines, the topic would change to another task. Even though less time was spent talking about the writing project, I knew my work would still be appreciated if I took the initiative to get started on it and let other people focus on projects that were priorities to them.

I wish I had known when I started that I would need to make a bigger effort to step out of my comfort zone and try something new. I very quickly fell into the habit of picking up tasks that were focused on writing because I knew that was something I enjoyed and could do. If I had known how easy it would be for me to get stuck in that rut, I would have pushed myself harder to ask for different types of tasks earlier on.

The advice I would give to someone pursuing an internship at a nonprofit is to always ask for more to do instead of waiting to be given something to do. Delegating tasks takes a lot of time, and in a small organization, like the one I worked at, there is not a lot of that to spare. Don’t worry about “bothering” people by asking them for more to do, because you will be helping them in the long run by allowing them to use your time, skills, and effort in the most efficient way possible.

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.