Writing:Profiles of state legislatures

Writing the lead section →

Writing about state legislatures
Introduction
Leadership
Partisan breakdown
Party colors
Elections
List of members
Standing committees
Districts • History
Notable features • Links
Graphics • Categories
Library of tutorials
Writing about elections
Writing about legislators
State legislative project

This page is a content-and-style guide about how to write overview articles about state legislative chambers.

There are 99 such state legislative chambers in the United States, which means that on Ballotpedia, there are 99 such articles, along with an additional 49 articles about the combined state legislature, or 148 articles altogether.

For example, there is Alaska State Senate, Alaska House of Representatives and Alaska State Legislature.

What this page is

This page is a general overview of what you might aim for in an article on Ballotpedia that is an overview article about a state legislative chamber.

For each suggested section of an article about a state legislative chamber, there are help articles with guidelines discussing just that section. Each of those articles can be accessed in the menu you'll find on the far right of this page.

See also: Overall state legislature project

Order of components

When the symbol a appears in front of items in the lists below, it means that a particular set of guidelines is developed to the extent that you can generally rely on it for your work.

We recommend that an article about a state legislative chamber include these components (sections), in this order.

All 148 articles already exist, with standard categories, so the main purpose of these writing guidelines is to allow further development of the articles and to ensure that, as far as possible given the individual variances between legislative chambers, the articles follow a standard flow.

a Introductory (lead) section
a Leadership
a Partisan breakdown
a Election histories
a Lists of members
a Standing committees
a Districts
a Histories
a Notable features
a External links
a Graphics
a Categories