Forget philosophical arguments or dry lists of statistics.

When writing your Member of Congress about an issue, it's more important to talk about yourself.

That's the message from Christopher Kush, a grassroots advocacy consultant in Washington, D.C., and author of "The One-Hour Activist," a step-by-step guide to effective advocacy.

In this interview, he tells Congress.org members about the need to share how policy decisions will affect them personally and how to write in a natural voice.

In your book, you talk about the importance of telling your story. What do you mean by that?

Sometimes when people are sending a message to Washington, D.C., they assume that they should sound like a lobbyist and get very technical in detail.

At my consulting firm, we try to get people to write like they normally speak. It's not because we think they couldn't talk about the technical details, but because it's a more effective way to get their message across.

Telling your story helps elected officials understand how proposed legislation will play out in the real world with people like you.

It's also one of the only ways we have of keeping a policy discussion from being mind-numbingly boring.

What if my story isn't that interesting?

People often get stuck because they feel if they don't have the perfect story to be a poster child for their issue then their letter won't be effective.

That's not true. By sharing their story, they show that the issue is important to them and by extension the people who live in their district.

You do not have to be personally affected in a particularly dramatic way for your story to be interesting to an elected official.

So you don't have to have a daughter with cancer to write about health care reform...

You can have a daughter and you're concerned about her prospects for living a cancer-free life, if that's the truth. That can be a very powerful statement.

It's more important to be accurate.

Elected officials develop a very good sense of when a story is fabricated. It's usually because details end up being too perfect.

If a story sounds like it is apocryphal or exaggerated, elected officials will end up questioning how truthful the rest of the letter is.

The more honest you are and the more you resist trying to make your story be something other than what it is, the more likely they are to respond to it.

You also advise people to start by saying where they live. Why is that?

The first thing that people have to understand is that government in the United States is organized around geography.

It's not organized around what your interests are or which party you like or who you support. You are interesting first and foremost to an elected official because you live in their district or their state.

A mistake people often make when writing Congress is they bury or are coy about specifically where they live.

Often times they will jump into talking about an important issue and never take the time to explain where their house is located.

But until you explain where you live, an elected official is not going to listen to you.

Reported and edited by Ryan Teague Beckwith.