A. Identify an issue you care about specifically.
Education, Climate Change, Healthcare, and Immigration are all good examples.
B. Do a key word search for legislation in the California Assembly relating to your specific issue.
The URL for the database of introduced bills in the California Assembly is
http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billSearchAdvClient.xhtml .
C. Find one bill under that topic that you feel you can support based on the summary at the top
of the bills webpage and that you can research enough to construct a fact sheet around.
D. Your assignment is to construct a factsheet supporting the bill you have identified. Effective
fact sheet are discussed on page 65 of Carrolls book. Page 66 contains a checklist of items an
effective factsheet should have. Page 67 contains a fact sheet that would receive a B or B+ on
the assignment. Page 68-69 contains a factsheet that would receive an A- on the assignment.
In terms of the grading of your factsheet, makes sure you have specific facts supported by data
as to why a legislator should support your bill or your position on the issue that your bill
represents. Examples of these are in bold on page 68-69. Make sure you list the bill youre
supporting on the top of the page like in the examples.
The factsheet should only be ONE page. On the back include citations for any sources of
information you use.
E. How the fact sheet looks will be a major criterion of the grading. No one wants to read a
paper that is merely blocks of black and white text. Include graphics, text boxes, etc. Make sure
all text is readable. If someone looks at the fact sheet and feels reading it is a choir, they wont.
F. Less text is better here! Use pictures, images, text boxes, charts, bold, italics, bullet points.
