for ‘therefore’, 
for ‘because’, and so on, and you can add to these at will as long as you know what you mean.The writing tasks discussed in the immediately preceding sections of this manual can be made much easier if the comparatively mundane business of taking notes and making summaries is carried out effectively. This chapter contains advice on both of these, together with a section on preparing agendas and taking the minutes of meetings.
None of these is a compositional task like the writing of a report, essay, or letter. They all are mostly concerned with working with written or spoken words supplied by other people. A common requirement for all of them, therefore, is the ability to understand what other people are trying to communicate and, in particular, to distinguish between what is significant and what is of less importance. This skill can be developed on its own through careful reading and listening. But it can also be usefully linked with the writing skills discussed in the earlier part of this manual. In acquiring the ability to organize your own material and signal your most important points, you become better able to recognize the use that other people make of the same or similar procedures. Similarly, from concentrating on other people’s words, and analysing and assessing them, you may be able to extend the range and scope of your own technique.
The ability to take good notes is an invaluable skill for anyone who has to prepare a piece of writing that is not entirely dependent on his or her own inspiration and thinking. People who cannot or do not make good notes have to spend precious time retracing their steps when they come to the actual point of writing, especially if they no longer have to hand the source material they originally used. Moreover, taking proper notes does more than simply save time. The act of writing something down very often helps to fix it in the memory. If you take notes, paradoxically, you may find you do not have to rely on them too heavily when you come to write.
Notes are only useful if you can understand what they mean when you come to read them again, days, months, or even years afterwards. Notes, therefore, have to be clear. Unless you are taking notes on behalf of someone else or intending to lend your notes to a friend or colleague, they only have to be clear to you. Even so, you may be making notes at the beginning of the academic year for an exam that takes place at the end of it.
Notes also frequently have to be made at speed – especially if you are making notes on a lecture or presentation rather than on something you are reading. If you happen to know shorthand, you have an immediate advantage. The average person does not, but it is still possible to reduce the amount of ink put down on paper by using abbreviations and symbols and by shortening words. Standard abbreviations (for example e.g. and i.e.) can live alongside your own abbreviations of names of people or characters in books, or single letters for things or concepts that occur repeatedly in the text. It is common practice to use + for ‘and’, < for ‘less than’, > for ‘greater than’, for ‘therefore’, for ‘because’, and so on, and you can add to these at will as long as you know what you mean.
The usual way to shorten words is to leave off the endings, for example: min (minimum), max (maximum), poss (possible), or by omitting some or all of the vowels, fncl (financial) dvlpmnt (development). You can also borrow a technique from simple shorthand by writing words as they sound, especially those that can be represented by a single letter or character R, U, Y, 4. If you have a mobile phone and send text messages frequently, you may already be well practised at this. It is almost inevitable that, if you have to take notes regularly, you will develop some kind of personal shorthand writing.
The best way to ensure clarity is to go back over the notes you have written while the material is still fresh in your mind. In this way you can check that everything is legible and makes sense. If the notes are to be kept for any length of time, then it will probably be useful to organize them, including headings and underlining or colour-highlighting to mark the particularly important points.
If you are taking notes for a specific purpose, then as you read or listen, you will be mentally sorting the material into the relevant and irrelevant and only noting down what is relevant. You can, in fact, make a list of headings before you start and allocate your notes to the appropriate headings as you write them. If the purpose is specific and limited, you may discover as you check the notes after the event that you can discard some of them because they appear less relevant with the benefit of hindsight or because the point is covered elsewhere.
Often, however, the purpose is more general. You may, for instance, be listening to a lecture on a topic, several aspects of which could come up in exam questions at a future date. In that case, you will want as full a record as possible. The key, though, is still to recognize and latch on to the essential material.
A good speaker should make it comparatively easy for members of the audience to take notes. The basic procedure that most speakers adopt – see the section on ‘Presentations’ pp. 273–8 – is to tell you what they’re going to say, to say it, and then to tell you that they’ve said it. This pattern, if adhered to, gives you three opportunities to make notes. The introduction will probably give you a basic idea of the structure of the talk. Try to jot down the structural outline. You may even be able to make a framework of headings for other notes if you work quickly. Then comes the main body of the talk, leading to the conclusion – which is likely to be at least in part a recapitulation – giving you an opportunity to check that you have covered everything of importance.
You will not want to miss out entirely on the experience of the talk by being preoccupied with taking notes to the exclusion of everything else. Speakers and lecturers usually rely on a sense of contact with the audience and do not want to see their listeners’ heads buried in notebooks. Speakers should signal the fact that they are making points that they consider particularly noteworthy. Listen out for the signals, and use them. Otherwise try to divide your attention between the speaker and your notes.
One method of making notes from a text is simply to underline or highlight the important sentences or draw a line down the side of the page next to an important passage. This is only workable if the book is your book, you are going to keep it to hand, and you do not mind writing on it. A separate set of notes has the advantage of being independent of the volume in question, and you have the benefit of partly fixing things in your mind by writing them down.
A good written text, like a good speech, has signals and structural elements which the note-taker can use to advantage. Headings in the text provide useful pointers and, in a paragraph, the first sentence is often the one to concentrate on (though remember, there is no rule that states that every paragraph has to begin with a ‘topic sentence’). The main idea may be all that you actually need to note down.
Here, as an example, are the opening paragraphs of a piece of literary criticism, together with the kind of notes that might usefully be made on it.
Any great play will, perhaps, to some degree take on the nature of its protagonist. At least this seems to be the case with Hamlet. It is as if the play itself shared the hero’s propensity for analysing his own being. Its preoccupation with language, thought, and action, the main constituents of drama, is supplemented by a direct concern with the idea of a play, by discussions of such matters as ‘the purpose of playing’, the production of stage illusion, the degree of identity between an actor and his role and the response to be expected from an audience, and by the inclusion of a play within the play.
My main concern, however, is not with the paradoxes of the theatre but with language. The play requires a particularly critical sensitivity to language on the part of its audience. Indeed it could be said to generate such a sensitivity in them. Where there is so much deceit and equivocation in what characters say, one has always to try and ascertain the purpose for which language is being used and what motivates a particular choice of words. These considerations lead ultimately to the question of what language is in relation to thought and action. I am not claiming that Hamlet is unique in encouraging a response of this kind, merely that the demand for this kind of response is more urgent than in other plays.
Stephen Curtis, in an essay ‘The Cool Web’, 1974
Let us assume that we are making notes on this passage for the purpose of writing an essay on Hamlet rather than summarizing the writer’s whole argument, because it begins and ends with general reflections that are not necessarily relevant to an essay on the play itself. The notes might be set out like this:
Hamlet – nature of play
Like hero, self-concerned, i.e. is a play that deals with nature of theatre
– ‘purpose of playing’ (Act 3, sc. ii)
– stage illusion
– actor and role
– audience reaction
– play within play
Language – main concern
Play requires ‘critical sensitivity to language’ on part of audience
characters use language to deceive analyse their purposes and motives
lead to → general question of relations between language, thought, and action (this also, see ↑, basic concern of theatre)
There is no reason to try and save space when making notes. In fact it is better to leave gaps for additional notes or comments you might want to add later (perhaps in a different-coloured ink) as you read further or other ideas occur to you. Notice also the use of headings to denote the topic of a section or paragraph and the use of underlining to highlight the main points. Inverted commas – or some other form of marking – should also be used to distinguish quotations from your own paraphrases. When you come back to the notes later, and the source is no longer available to be consulted, you need to be able to tell at a glance what are your words and what the author’s to avoid accusations of plagiarism.
When taking notes from published texts remember to record the bibliographical details so that you can include the work in your bibliography (see ‘References’, pp. 291–2).
Producing summaries is an activity closely connected with the taking of notes. The simplest way to produce a summary is to try to connect a set of notes within a simple linking framework. If, for example, you wished to summarize the opening paragraphs of the essay on Hamlet quoted in the previous section, you could take the notes you made (p. 299):
Hamlet – nature of play
Like hero, self-concerned, i.e. is a play that deals with nature of theatre
– ‘purpose of playing’ (Act 3, sc. ii)
– stage illusion
– actor and role
– audience reaction
– play within play
Language – main concern
Play requires ‘critical sensitivity to language’ on part of audience
characters use language to deceive analyse their purposes and motives
lead to → general question of relations between language, thought, and action (this also, see ↑, basic concern of theatre)
and link them together like this:
Hamlet, the play, examines the nature of theatre, just as Hamlet, the character, examines his own nature. Besides containing a play within the play, it discusses theatrical questions, e.g. how actors relate to their roles and audiences respond. It also examines language critically. The characters use language to deceive, prompting analysis of their motives, and there is a general concern with the relations between thought, language, and action.
Because a summary is a piece of continuous prose it cannot usually contain quite as much information, within the space allowed, as a good set of notes. In addition to connecting the notes, therefore, you may well need to edit and rearrange them.
If you are asked to produce a summary, you will often be told what length to aim at: ‘Make a summary of this in about 200 words.’
If no length is set, then it is recommended that a shorter passage should be reduced to approximately a quarter of its original length and a longer passage to one tenth. But everything depends on the purpose for which the summary is being produced. A summary for a business report should not, if at all possible, exceed one page. As a report might run to a hundred, several hundred, or a thousand or more pages, the proportions need to be much smaller than one to ten.
A summary is often an integral part of a longer piece of work such as a report or a dissertation. You only write the summary, however, when the rest of the work is complete. As it is your own work, you will know it very well – possibly even too well to be able to undertake the drastic downscaling required to fit, say, 200 pages of work onto one page without an effort. You need to ask yourself one question: what does the reader absolutely have to know in order to understand what this exercise was all about, how it was conducted, what the results were, and, where appropriate, what recommendations were made? Your introduction, conclusion, and recommendations are the places where this information is likely to be found. They, consequently, should be less drastically compressed than the body of the report. From that, you omit all but the absolutely essential detail. If the reader wants to understand the exact process by which you arrived at your conclusions, he or she must read the whole report.
When summarizing your own work it can often help to allow an interval of time between the compilation of the main text and your compilation of the summary. In this way you will be able to gain a better perspective on what are the key issues that need to be included in your summary.
The essence of producing an effective summary is recognizing the main points made by the piece of writing that you are summarizing. It is, therefore, firstly an exercise in reading and understanding, because if you cannot understand what the writer is trying to communicate, then you cannot hope to reproduce his or her ideas in a shorter form. This may seem an obvious point, but not all writing is clear and the sense is not always easy to extract. When the main thrust of the piece is clear in your own mind, then go through the text and either underline the key points or make a separate list of them. Here, for example, is a text based on an article in a textbook for learners of business German: C. Conlin, Unternehmen Deutsch (London: Chancerel International Publishers Ltd, 1995, P.131).
According to a recent study carried out in the USA the manufacture of personal computers is a very environmentally-unfriendly activity.
Until now it was thought that computers had a negative impact on the environment principally when they were in use or when they were discarded or recycled. The new study, however, suggests that, even before a new PC is switched on for the first time, it has already:
consumed as much electricity as the average household would use in the course of a whole year;
used up as much water as it would take to fill the average bath tub every day for six months;
produced twice its own weight in waste; and
pumped as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a car would in travelling 4000 miles.
What makes matters worse is that, in comparison with other electronic consumer goods such as TVs and hi-fis, PCs have a very short lifespan. Planned obsolescence used to be thought of as a feature of the motor-industry. Nowadays, it is the computer industry that is continually enhancing the specifications of its products and leaving last year’s models behind. Some companies are reputed to replace their entire stock of personal computers every year.
The message to the environmentally-conscious consumer is clear. Avoid buying a new PC. Either upgrade your existing model or buy another one second-hand. If you absolutely have to buy a brand new PC, opt for one of the ‘green’ models now appearing on the market.
This is a text of 251 words and the aim is to produce a summary of about a quarter that length, say 65 words.
The main points might be listed as follows:
1. manufacturing computers is environmentally unfriendly
2. planned obsolescence of computers makes matters worse
3. consumers should avoid buying new PCs
That is the basic skeleton of what the article is saying. To this we can add a few details.
1. manufacturing computers is environmentally unfriendly as aresult of
electricity and water consumption waste and CO2 production
2. planned obsolescence of computers makes matters worse
replaced more often than other equipment
3. consumers should avoid buying new PCs
upgrade, buy second-hand, or buy ‘green’
There is one other point that needs to be mentioned, namely the article is not based on first-hand knowledge, but reports the results of a study carried out in the USA. That fact needs to be mentioned to put the whole in the correct perspective.
Working on the basis of the second set of notes, we might then come up with a summary such as this:
According to a US study, computer manufacturing is environmentally unfriendly, because making a PC consumes disproportionate amounts of water and electricity and generates large quantities of waste and carbon dioxide. Through planned obsolescence, PCs are replaced more frequently than other electronic devices. This aggravates the situation. Consumers are recommended to upgrade their existing PCs, buy secondhand or, if they have to buy new, to buy ‘green’.
Once the summary is complete it should be checked for length and for accuracy. In particular you should check that in shortening the text you have not altered its stance on the subject. The above article, for instance, is written from a generally ‘green’ perspective. If the purpose is to render the essentials of an original text, it would be misleading to inject a note of greater scepticism by beginning ‘A US study claims or alleges…’
One final point on summaries. While you may not be called upon very often to make summaries, summarizing is a worthwhile skill in itself, insofar as a great deal of editing work involves pruning and deleting while retaining the general shape and sense of a text. If you can summarize the work produced by someone else, you may find it easier to remove superfluities from your own.
Agendas and minutes provide the written framework that gives shape to the verbal proceedings of a meeting. The tasks of drafting an agenda and writing up the minutes often fall to the same person, though that person is seldom in overall charge of the meeting. If you happen to be given either or both of these jobs, then you will need to collaborate closely with the chairperson – or whoever else is in charge – before, during, and after the meeting. Collaborating with the chair not only ensures that the meeting runs as smoothly as possible, but also makes life easier for yourself.
Different organizations are likely to use different conventions for agendas and minutes. If you are unfamiliar with them, then study the records of previous meetings to find out what the standard procedures are. If, for any reason, you think the existing conventions should be changed, then obtain the agreement of the chairperson and any other interested parties before you begin.
An agenda is principally a list of points for discussion at a meeting, but it has other purposes as well. Besides giving advance notice that a meeting is to take place and stating its purpose, it also prepares people for the meeting. It is often accompanied by documents that have to be read by the participants if they want to understand fully what is going on so they can participate effectively. In addition, the agenda helps the chair to keep control of the meeting and provides the framework around which the minute-taker constructs the minutes.
There are certain standard items that belong to most agendas. First a title (Team Meeting, Annual General Meeting of the Broxworth Cricket Club) or a statement of the nature and purpose of the meeting (Public Meeting to discuss the threatened closure of Wickhampton Junior School), followed by the date, time, and venue of the meeting, and a list of the people who will be attending it. Then come the opening of the meeting by the chair, apologies for absence, the reading and/or approval of the minutes of the previous meeting (the minutes do not have to be read if they have been circulated beforehand), and matters arising from the minutes. These are followed by the specific points for discussion, often ending with ‘Any other business’ and closure by the chair. All the various items on the agenda are numbered and a traditional agenda for a club committee meeting or similar event might look like this:
Meeting of the Wonsley Drama Club Committee
Wednesday November 21st 2001, 7.30 p.m. at 70 Hansford Square
To attend: Rowena Moxon (chair)
Jim Bean (sec.)
Mike Roy
Andrew Hill
Peggy Chandler
Angela Gauntlett (director, Blithe Spirit)
1 Apologies for absence
2 Minutes of last meeting
3 Matters arising from minutes
4 Report on progress of current production, Blithe Spirit (Angela Gauntlett, director)
5 Approval of additional budget for current production
6 Preparations for Club Christmas party
7 Any other business
8 Date and venue for next meeting (please bring diary)
Jim Bean (Hon. Sec.)
Simple agendas of this sort are a staple of community life throughout the country. It is, however, possible to do more with an agenda and, especially in professional contexts, it is often desirable to do more.
First there is the question of timing. It is generally reckoned that, to be effective, a meeting should not last longer than an hour and a half. If there is more to discuss than can be accommodated within ninety minutes, then a break should be built into the agenda. Within that framework, it may be possible to allocate a specific amount of time to each item – this is a matter for the chairperson to decide on.
Then there is the ordering of the items for discussion. Urgent items should come first and, where all items are roughly equal in terms of urgency, it is probably better to put matters that can be dealt with quickly at the top of the agenda. Items requiring longer discussion can go further down. ‘Any other business’ can be dispensed with if the agenda has been circulated in draft form before the meeting and all the participants have been given an opportunity to suggest additional items for inclusion.
Finally, the chairperson and secretary will often know in advance who will be speaking to a particular point and this can be specified in the agenda.
Bearing all this in mind, an agenda of the following sort might be drawn up (dispensing with the formal preliminaries such as approving minutes):
Millstone Dictionary Project
Team Meeting
Conference room, December 4th 2001 10–11.30 a.m.
To attend: Steve Huggins (chair)
Bridget Newman (sec.)
Sally Collins
Ralph Hodgson
Kathryn Sneath
1 |
Schedule |
|
Steve to give details of revised schedule |
(10 mins) |
|
2 |
New freelancers |
|
Sally to update on progress in finding additional freelance compilers |
(5 mins) |
|
3 |
Expert compilers |
|
Ralph to present system for speeding up compilation by channelling difficult words to designated expert compilers |
(20 mins) |
|
4 |
Motivating freelancers |
|
Steve to suggest bonus scheme to motivate freelancers and call for additional/alternative suggestions |
(25 mins) |
|
5 |
Date and venue of next meeting |
|
Please bring diaries! |
When the chairperson and secretary have agreed on the matters to be discussed at the meeting, a draft agenda should be drawn up and circulated to everyone who is to attend. This should take place about a week before the meeting. If there are any comments on the agenda that lead to its being changed, then the revisions should be made as quickly as possible so that the final agenda can be circulated, together with any supporting documents, early enough to allow people time to prepare.
Minutes form a permanent record of what took place at a meeting, and may be required for legal as well as professional purposes. They also act as a reminder of decisions taken and action decided upon, besides being an aid to the drafting of the agenda for a subsequent meeting. They should be impartial, giving a fair and true account of what was said, and should be kept brief yet also clear. It should be possible for anyone who did not attend the meeting but who is interested in its outcome to gain an accurate impression of what happened.
Even if the minute-taker is not involved in drawing up the agenda, his or her work begins before the meeting takes place. The person taking the minutes needs to be familiar not only with the agenda, but also with any supporting documentation. The crucial factor in taking minutes is to grasp what is important and relevant among the many matters said in the course of a meeting. Anything you can find out in advance about the subjects to be discussed, or who is likely to say what, will be valuable.
As with agendas, different conventions concerning format apply in different places. You will need to find out in advance what sort of minutes are required. A simple action plan, setting out what was decided and who has been made responsible for doing what, may be sufficient. More often, the minutes will consist of a general account of what was said without remarks necessarily being attributed to specific individuals. Sometimes minutes need to be written up very formally, with the identity of every contributor duly noted. The usual practice can be discovered from previous minutes or by consulting the chairperson.
In addition, you may need to consult with the chairperson to ensure that you have the right to intervene if you need clarification of any point. It is not always clear, for instance, whether a decision has been reached or who has been assigned a particular task. The chairperson should not allow the meeting to proceed until the point has been cleared up, but you may need to speak up and ask for the matter to be clarified.
It is the minute-taker’s job to record who was present at the meeting (except in the case of a very large meeting), who was absent, and who sent apologies for absence. The main work comes when the meeting gets under way.
Some of what has already been said in this book about taking notes (see ‘Note-taking’, pp. 295–8) will apply to the taking of minutes. But a meeting is far less structured than a talk and there may be very little recapitulation (though a good chairperson will often summarize before passing on to the next item on the agenda). You will need to devise a method of taking notes that does not prevent you from listening carefully so that you can sort out what is important and needs to be noted and what can be safely omitted. You may also need to be able to identify who said what.
A method often adopted is to use a pad with two wide margins. Use the left-hand margin to record the name of the speaker, the central and largest section to jot down the key points in what he or she said, and the right-hand margin to record decisions taken and who is responsible for further action:
Dave F. |
Last year’s d. poorly supported, not good value, |
Jane C. |
New caterer contacted, sure could do better deal, |
Alice Β. |
supported Jane – long tradition – suggested |
Jane C. to
contact CC &
report back
The minutes should always follow the agenda exactly. Each section of notes should be identified by the number of the item on the agenda or the heading taken from the agenda.
Like any other notes, minutes should be written up as soon as possible after the event. The degree of formality required in the presentation of minutes varies. Verbatim minutes of the Hansard type, in which every word is taken down and attributed to a particular person, can, realistically, only be taken by a professional shorthand recorder or secretary and therefore fall outside the scope of this discussion. You may, however, be required to mention by name everyone who spoke, without actually citing his or her actual words. In such instances, reported (or indirect) speech (see also pp. 19–20) is used:
4. Club Christmas dinner
David Farrer proposed that this year’s dinner should be cancelled, on the grounds that last year’s had been poorly supported, had not been good value for money and had been held at a venue that he described as ‘dismal’. Jane Carpenter replied that there was still support for a Christmas dinner among the membership and that she had contacted a new caterer who seemed to offer a better deal. She asked for suggestions for an alternative venue. Alice Bahadur suggested the premises of the local Cricket Club…
This, however makes for very long and full minutes. It will usually suffice to concentrate on the background to an issue, the issue itself, the decision that was reached, and any action that was decided on, without necessarily referring to any contributors to the debate by name:
4. Club Christmas dinner
Because of poor attendance at last year’s dinner and dissatisfaction with the venue and catering, it was proposed that this year’s event should be cancelled. However, several members expressed support for continuing the event. A new caterer, offering better value, has been found and a new venue, the Cricket Club, was suggested. The proposal was consequently not carried. Jane Carpenter has been asked to contact the Cricket Club with a view to using their premises for the dinner and to report back.
There is enough information here to give a non-attender at the meeting a reasonably clear idea of what went on. This style of writing minutes does, however, often lead to a heavy use of passive verbs and impersonal instructions (it was proposed that…, it was argued that…, there was agreement…). A mixture of the two styles with limited personal attribution of remarks may be the best solution:
Because of poor attendance at last year’s dinner and dissatisfaction with the venue and catering, David Farrer proposed that this year’s event should be cancelled. However, several members expressed support for continuing the event,… etc.
Once the minutes have been written, they should be shown to the chairperson for checking. If approved, they should then be circulated, at the latest with the agenda for the next meeting.