Writing:State legislator's committee assignments

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This page is a content-and-style guide about how to write sections about the committee assignments of incumbent state legislators.

The committee assignments section primarily applies to incumbents, although it could remain relevant for someone who is no longer in office as a historical record of the committees they served on.

The name of this section should be "Committee assignments".

The purpose of this section is to acquaint your readers with key information about the committees that the legislator serves on. If you have access to notable information about the impact of this legislator in a particular committee, how they got appointed to it, and so on, that can also be included here.

Background information

• Every state legislature (joint), every state senate, and every state house/assembly has standing committees such as the Rules Committee, Utah Senate.
• Virtually every state legislator is assigned to serve on one or more of these standing committees.
• It is usually easy to ascertain which committees a legislator serves on, since the legislator will usually provide this information on his/her official website and, failing that, the official state legislative website will nearly always have a section devoted to describing the standing committees and who is on them.
• Articles on Ballotpedia about the various state senates, state houses/assemblies and state legislature (joint) list the known standing committees of those chambers.

• Here's an example.

Chambers

See also: Writing:State legislative standing committees

• Find the legislative chamber you're interested in here: {{state legislatures}}

• Note that the legislator whose profile you are editing may serve on committees specific to his or her chamber (state house or state senate) and may also serve on one or more "joint" committees. A joint committee is a committee that includes members from both the state house and the state senate in that state. To find the names of joint committees on Ballotpedia, you must go to the article about that state's legislature and look for the section within it about that legislature's joint committees, for example: Washington State Legislature#Joint Committees.

Procedure

• Locate a source of information that tells you what committees the legislator you're writing about serves on.
• Add a "Committee assignments" section heading to your article with the following intro:
• In another tab, open the article about the legislative chamber this legislator serves in, and locate the section of that article that lists the chamber's standing committees.
• Add the following opening introduction to the section: In the 2011-2012 legislative session, LAST NAME has been appointed to the following committees:

• If you are listing committee assignments for prior years, the intro should read: In the 2010-2011 legislative session, LAST NAME served on these committees:

• Copy-and-paste the appropriate committee names/links from the section of that chamber article to the "Committee assignments" section of the article you're writing about a specific legislator.
• Add a wiki-linked name of your article subject to the article about the standing committee.

Examples

• Paul Stam
• Dorothy "Sue" Landske