How do you write meeting minutes in English?
In English the record is "the minutes", usually written in the past tense and the third person. It opens with a frame ("Minutes of the project meeting held on 12 March", "Present", "Apologies"), reports contributions with reporting verbs ("Anna reported that …"), records decisions — often with "It was agreed that …", though active sentences work too — and includes action points in the format "Action: Maria to send the revised budget by Friday."
- Frame: Minutes of the … meeting held on … / Present / Apologies / Date of next meeting.
- Report and decide: Anna reported that … / Tom proposed … / It was agreed that … / The team agreed to …
- Action point = name + to + base form + deadline: Action: Maria to send the revised budget by Friday.
B2 · Meetings · 10 minWriting meeting minutes, taught brick by brick.
A structured lesson for B2 learners. Hear a decision as it appears in the minutes, meet the building blocks of English minutes from a tutor — the frame, reporting verbs, decision formulas and action points — then practise the forms in interactive drills before the closing quiz. The whole arc takes about ten minutes and nothing requires a signup.
- CEFR levelB2 · Upper intermediate
- Time to completeAbout 10 minutes
- SkillsWriting, Reading, Business English, Grammar
- Bricks10 blocks
01 / 06
What minutes do, and what they do not do
Minutes are the official written record of a meeting: a short account of what was discussed, what was decided and who agreed to do what. They are not a transcript. Nobody expects you to capture every sentence; the real skill is turning an hour of conversation into a page that someone who was not in the room can follow. That is why minutes have a recognisable voice. They are usually written in the past tense, because by the time anyone reads them the meeting is over: "Anna reported that the migration was on schedule." They are usually written in the third person, with names or roles instead of "I" and "you": "The chair welcomed the new team members", "Tom proposed moving the go-live to November." And they are selective. A long debate about a supplier often shrinks to one line of discussion, one decision and one action point. At B2 you already have the grammar for all of this: the past simple, reported speech, the passive. What this lesson adds is the set of fixed frames and formulas that make minutes look and sound like minutes, so that your record reads as professional English rather than as a translated German document.
02 / 06
The frame: header and standard headings
Minutes open with a header that answers three questions: which meeting, when, and who was there. A typical first line is "Minutes of the project meeting held on 12 March", with the time and place added if needed: "held on 12 March at 10:00 via video call". Below it come the attendance lines. "Present:" lists everyone who attended, often with the chair marked: "Anna Weber (chair)". In many British organisations the next heading is "Apologies:", short for "apologies for absence": the people who could not come and said so in advance. Other organisations simply write "Absent:". The body then follows the agenda item by item, with the same numbers and titles: "1. Minutes of the last meeting", "2. Budget review", "3. IT migration". Formal minutes often start by approving the previous record — "The minutes of the meeting held on 26 February were approved" — and many organisations include a "Matters arising" item for loose ends from last time and a final "AOB", short for "any other business". Decisions and action points either sit under each item or are collected at the end. The last line gives the next date: "Date of next meeting: 26 March". Keep the headings short; they are signposts, not sentences.
03 / 06
Reporting what was said: reporting verbs in the past
Under each agenda item you summarise the discussion, and this is where reporting verbs do the work. Choose the verb that shows what kind of contribution it was: "Anna reported that the migration was on schedule" (an update), "David explained that the supplier had changed its delivery dates" (background), "Priya pointed out that the budget did not include training" (a problem someone flagged), "Maria asked whether the go-live could move" (a question), "Tom proposed moving the go-live to November" (a proposal). Because the meeting is over, the reported clause usually shifts back one step: "is" becomes "was", "has changed" becomes "had changed", "will" becomes "would". When something is still true as you write, you will also see the present kept — "Anna reported that the migration is on schedule" — so treat the shift as the usual choice rather than a law. Watch the verb patterns as well. "Report" and "explain" need "to" before the listener: "reported to the board that …", not "reported the board that …". "Suggest" takes an -ing form or a that-clause: "Priya suggested finding a second supplier" or "Priya suggested that the team should find a second supplier", but not "suggested to find".
04 / 06
Recording decisions: "It was agreed that …" and the active alternative
Decisions are the part of the minutes people come back to, so they need to be unmistakable. A common formal option is the impersonal passive with "it": "It was agreed that the go-live would move to November", "It was decided to look for a second supplier". These formulas record the outcome without attributing it to one speaker, which suits a decision that belongs to the whole group. A close relative is "It was noted that travel costs were over budget": it records information the meeting took on board without deciding anything. The passive formulas are not the only correct option, though. Active sentences are perfectly good minutes English: "The team agreed to move the go-live to November", "The board approved the revised budget", and in informal team notes "We agreed to move the go-live to November". What matters more than the choice is consistency: see how your organisation does it and keep that style through the whole document. Two details make a decision line precise. Say what was decided, not just that something was talked about — "The budget was discussed" tells a later reader nothing. And use "discuss" without "about": "The team discussed the budget", not "discussed about the budget".
05 / 06
Action points: name + to + verb + deadline
The action list is where minutes turn into work, and English has a compact format for it: "Action: Maria to send the revised budget by Friday." Read it as a shortened "Maria is to send …": a name, then "to" plus the base form of the verb, then the task, and finally the deadline. There is no "will" in this format, and the verb takes no ending. Precisely because the format is so short, a wrong verb form slips in easily: "Maria to sending" and "Maria to sends" are both broken, because after this "to" the verb stays in its base form. Many teams set out the action points as a table with the columns Action, Owner and Deadline, which forces every line to be complete. Give each action a single owner where you can; with "Tom and Maria to look into it", it is often unclear later who reports back. State the deadline with "by": "by Friday", "by 20 March", "by the next meeting". At the next meeting the list comes back, often under "Matters arising", and each owner reports on their point.
06 / 06
The German trap: Protokoll, "protocol" and the plural
German speakers easily reach for "protocol" when they mean "Protokoll". The word exists in English, but it is not the usual word for the notes of a meeting. In English, "protocol" usually refers to a set of rules or an established procedure: diplomatic protocol, a safety protocol, a network protocol. The written record of a meeting is "the minutes". So you "take the minutes" when you keep the record, you "circulate the minutes" when you send them round, and the chair asks "Who's taking the minutes today?" The second half of the trap is grammar: in this sense "minutes" is a plural noun and takes a plural verb, even though it is one document. "The minutes were approved", "The minutes are attached", "Could you check the minutes before I send them round?" — note "them", not "it". "The minutes was approved" jars with a native reader straight away. Finally, pronunciation: "minutes" in this sense sounds exactly like the unit of time, /ˈmɪnɪts/, with the stress on the first syllable, not like the adjective "minute" (tiny), which is stressed on the second.