Writing notes

How good are you at writing notes in a meeting?

Personally, I'm really bad at doing it. I am concentrating on the conversation and so I don't really remember to make good notes. And then when I look at them afterwards, they don't make sense.

I think good notes in meetings have to be short. You don't want to write every single word.

Today we'll be talking about making and sharing written notes.

Hello and welcome to Office English from BBC Learning English. Your podcast guide to the world of work. I'm Pippa.

And I'm Phil. You can read along with this podcast using the subtitles and

So, Phil, we've just heard from our Learning English colleagues about how they take notes from meetings. Are you good at taking notes?

Um, I think I'm quite good at taking notes, but I'm not great at taking notes that anyone else can understand.

I see.

And I'm not always very good at doing anything with the notes that I take.

OK, so you write something down, but then you kind of forget about it.

Yes. Unless it's something really important. And then I would note it down.

OK, right. I think I am maybe similar. I think I have to do something with my notes straight away after the meeting, so send them around to people, make a list of tasks from the meeting. Otherwise, yeah, sometimes my notes can get a bit jumbled or lost, because if you have a lot of meetings, you can kind of forget what these notes were for or the context of them.

So today we'll talk about taking notes, sharing actions from the meeting, and we'll also talk about writing minutes, which are kind of more formal notes for a formal business meeting.

OK, let's start with a scenario. You're having a regular meeting with your colleagues at work, and you want to take notes. What's the best approach, Phil?

Actually, I think it's a good idea first to agree who's going to take notes. Because if you've got one person taking all the notes, it means other people are a bit freer to contribute to the meeting.

Yeah. If everyone's writing notes, it's a bit of a waste of time. You only need one set of notes, but also it's good to, if you can, vary who takes the notes in each meeting. So it's not always the same person, because I think a lot of us would find that when we're writing notes, it's harder to participate in the meeting. It's harder to, to talk because you have to concentrate on what people are saying and make sure you've written things down.

And then when you're taking notes, some things to remember are that you don't need to write full sentences or every word, particularly because you're writing quickly, you want to be able to take down something that you'll be able to remember and you'll be able to use, but you don't need to write it down in full, in perfect English.

Yeah. So you can use bullet points and headings and different things like that to help with your notes. Write them in a way that makes sense to you. And the key thing is to make sure you write down things that people have said that they're going to do, or that you've agreed that you will do. And we call these the action points from a meeting. And that's the most important thing really, to note, because if you haven't written that down, then you're probably going to forget to do the things that you said you would do.

We've talked about making notes. Now let's talk about sharing notes with everyone after the meeting. Um, Pippa, would you just send the piece of paper that you've written all your notes on?

No, I would not do that. Because if I sent round what I'd written during the meeting, most people probably wouldn't understand it. I usually write things in a way that makes sense to me, and then I will review the notes and make sure that they make sense to other people. So, I might write in full sentences or just add a few more words. I would list more clearly the action points that we discussed. So, some people do this in a different colour after kind of the bullet point. Or you could have a separate list which has your action points. Um, so yeah, I would definitely review my notes before sending them to other people.

Yeah. No, I'm the same. It would be very hard to understand the notes that I scribbled down in a meeting. Um, there's also things as well that in a meeting, you don't always go in the most logical order. So I might try and make the order make more sense. Or group things together that make more sense together.

Mm, yeah. And I would usually when I send notes to people, just ask, does anyone have anything else to add? Because when you're making notes, we're all human. You can miss something, or someone might have just remembered something differently to you. So that can be helpful just in case you've missed anything. OK, we've talked about notes for more informal meetings, but sometimes meetings need to have more formal notes. Right, Phil?

Yes. And we have something called minutes, which is like a formal record of what's said and what's decided in a meeting. And we can even use that as a verb. You can say, um, can someone minute this meeting or I'm going to minute this meeting. Um, and it, it means to keep that formal record. Are they similar to the notes that we talked about scribbling down earlier, or are they a bit different?

They are a bit different. The same principles apply in that you don't want to write word for word, everything that's said, but they're more official. There needs to be a clear record of what was said, and these are often used for more official meetings. So maybe a board meeting at your company that happens maybe every couple of months. And so the minutes are stored for each meeting. And there's kind of an ongoing record of this meeting. They usually follow quite a specific structure as well. Don't they, Phil?

Yes. I mean, there may be stuff that's determined by your company, your organisation, but almost always they'll start with the title of the meeting, the date and a list, both of the people who are there and also quite often the apologies. And that just means the people who were asked to come but couldn't come for whatever reason.

Yes. And then the minutes will follow the agenda. So, we've talked about an agenda before in this podcast. It's just a list of what we're going to talk about in the meeting. And you would usually, if you were writing minutes, under each agenda point, you would summarise the discussion objectively. And objectively just means kind of fairly, reflecting all opinions, the discussion that was had. Like I said, it doesn't have to be every single word, but you wouldn't want it to just kind of reflect one side of the debate. You want kind of both of them.

And then you'd make sure that any decisions that are taken are recorded clearly. Um, and of course, from that decision, there might be action points, there might be deadlines. Um, so you'd need to record that as well.

And if you're thinking about how do I write this down without writing everything everyone says, I think it's useful to think about outcomes rather than writing a transcript. So what was the outcome of the discussion? That's the crucial thing that you need to write down in a, in a set of minutes.

Yeah. The other thing that's also really important to write down are the responsibilities. So it might be who's responsible for doing something, or it might be who's responsible for checking on the people that they're doing it or who they're doing it for. You'll often see in the minutes you see people's initials written down next to things, which you can usually match to the names at the top of the document.

Mhm. Yeah. And then another crucial step with minutes is that they're always sent round after the meeting. Because usually people need to review to make sure that minutes are accurate. And there might be sort of changes to the minutes if people feel that a certain discussion hasn't been represented correctly in them, because, as we said, they're kept as a record of the meeting and sometimes referred to in the next meeting. Right. Phil?

Yeah. I mean, it's very common that a meeting starts by going through the minutes of the previous meeting just to check that actions that have been promised have been done, or to see if any problems have come up from the things that were, that were agreed at the previous meeting.

OK. That's it for this episode of Office English. We'll be back next week with another episode.

What would you like us to talk about next on this podcast? Send us your questions about English at work to learningenglish@bbc.co.uk.

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