Agenda Comparison Grid and fact sheet: three deliverables

This is three deliverables, not one paper, and each is a different genre. Part 1 is a grid filled in on a supplied template — cells, not paragraphs. Part 2 is an analysis, also on the template, answering four specific questions about agencies, agenda access and sponsors. Part 3 is a one-page fact sheet or talking points brief aimed at a legislator or a member of their staff, which is a persuasion document written for someone who will read it standing up. Submissions that produce a single flowing essay have failed all three formats at once, and the loss is mechanical rather than intellectual: a marker checking the template for filled cells cannot find them in prose. Build them as three separate artefacts from the start. Naming each artefact in your submission — grid, analysis, brief — also tells the marker where to look for each of the three sets of criteria they are working through.

Check who the three administrations actually are before you begin, because this assignment has a moving target built into it. It asks for the current sitting president and the two previous ones, and the course examples, the readings and every model answer circulating from earlier terms name a different three. Getting this wrong is not a small error — it invalidates every cell in the grid and is visible in the first row. Confirm the three, then confirm that your chosen health issue was actually on the agenda of all three, because an issue that only one administration touched leaves two-thirds of the grid empty and there is no way to write your way out of that later. Ten minutes spent confirming both before any research starts is the highest-return ten minutes in the whole assignment.

The resource allocation row is the hardest cell and the one most often filled with an assertion. *Identify the allocations of financial and other resources* means budget requests, appropriations, named grant programmes, executive orders directing agencies to act, and staffing or agency capacity — not a statement that an administration supported the issue. Figures are findable: presidential budget requests are published, appropriations are enacted in law, and large programmes are named and funded in identifiable lines. One real number per administration, with its source and year, turns the row from opinion into comparison, and the comparison is the entire point of putting three administrations side by side. Where a precise figure is genuinely unavailable, saying so and citing the nearest documented commitment is still stronger than an unsupported claim that resources were dedicated.

Part 2 is where the course's theory is supposed to appear, and using its vocabulary explicitly is what separates an analysis from a set of guesses. *How do you think your selected healthcare issue might get on the agenda... How does it stay there?* is a direct prompt for agenda-setting theory: a problem stream, a policy stream and a politics stream that must converge, a window of opportunity that opens and closes, and a policy entrepreneur who couples them. The next question — who would you choose as the *entrepreneur, champion or sponsor* — uses that term deliberately. Answer with a named person or organisation and say what they bring: a committee seat, a constituency, a personal history with the issue, or the capacity to keep it alive when attention moves on. Choosing a champion who was actually active on your issue, rather than a well-known name, is also what makes the answer checkable rather than decorative.

Part 3 changes audience completely and the writing has to change with it. A fact sheet for a legislative staffer is one page, front loaded, scannable, and built on numbers with sources attached; nothing about it resembles an academic paragraph. Two things are explicitly required in it: why this issue belongs on the legislative agenda, and a justification of the nurse's role in agenda setting. That second requirement is not decoration — it is the assignment's own argument about why you are writing the brief at all, and it is the element most often reduced to a closing sentence. And note the sequencing instruction: Parts 1 and 2 are to be revised in light of the feedback you received in the Discussion before the fact sheet is built from them. Doing the revision before building the brief matters practically as well, since the brief is assembled from Parts 1 and 2 and rebuilding it afterwards is wasted work.