In a Meeting Notes Made Easy course online, one of the participants wowed me with the extra effort she has put into taking successful meeting notes in a foreign language: English.
To get her meeting notes down correctly and to write well in her new language, she has been creative and resourceful:
- When she landed a job working in a university department whose emphases were horticulture and entomology, she took a Master Gardener class and an entomology class to learn the language of her new position.
- When she began to work in a nursing department, she read nursing magazines, a biography of a nurse, and lots of nursing notes to write knowledgeably.
- When she was asked to take notes at an important Intelligence conference, a new field for her, she made a list of acronyms, abbreviations, and technical terms she found in the previous meeting notes and program reviews. Then she learned what they meant.
Of the third point above, she said, “This helped a lot since now the abbreviations meant something to me and I understood–to a certain extent–what they were talking about.”
Writing well requires turning desire into action. I hope this woman’s example inspired you as it did me.
Lynn
