Reading

Meeting minutes serve as a reference document recording the important decisions made in a meeting and the action to be taken as a result of those decisions. Minutes are generally written in a concise way and include only that information relevant to the points and tasks discussed in the meeting. As a result, they are written in a neutral/formal style and tend to be quite factual, not including opinion or speculation.

There are three types of meeting minutes:

1)      Action minutes – these are the most common form. They focus on the meeting outcomes, i.e. what decisions have been reached and what actions should be taken as a result.

2)      Discussion minutes – these give a fuller picture as to how decisions are made, thus they tend to be longer and more detailed. However, all the information should relate to the topics discussed in the meeting. Discussion minutes are taken when the decision-making process is important and may come under scrutiny at a later date. Discussion minutes also record the actions decided upon in the meeting.

3)      Verbatim minutes – these are an exact recording of everything said in the meeting by all the participants. As such, verbatim minutes are long and extremely detailed. However, this version of minutes is not common, and may only be necessary in a legal or political context, or in cases when rather contentious issues must be addressed.

With the advent of online meetings, web-conferencing and note-taking applications, meeting minutes have become more collaborative. Meeting participants can now add their notes or comments to the same document. This may be done in real time or once the document has been distributed to the meeting participants. The latter may occur if information relevant to the planned tasks becomes available after the meeting has finished. Feedback is usually expected from the meeting participants as to whether the minutes are an accurate representation of the meeting proceedings. This may simply be a comment directly to the distributor, or participants’ feedback may be expected at a subsequent meeting.

Since meeting minutes should be accurate and to the point, the language used is usually impersonal and direct, often including abbreviations or acronyms and technical jargon. Passive forms of verbs are commonly used (e.g.: Team was updated on project status), along with reported speech (e.g.: JT confirmed that health and safety training had commenced) and ellipsis, i.e. when words are omitted from a sentence, but the meaning of the sentence can still be understood (e.g.: Site manager already consulted about problem). Finally, in terms of structure, most meeting minutes follow a similar pattern to the example of action minutes shown below. Note that minutes will often include a list of attendees, as well as the names of those unable to attend the meeting. If the attendees are mentioned later in the main body of the text, the initials of their names are usually used.