Welcome to my online training: Minutes Made Easy: my popular course in a format you can study at your own time and pace, Speedwriting: to help take meeting notes as a minute-taker or for personal reference and Speedreading: to help with the quantity of reading that meetings demand.
There’s also your free gift – Dots & Squiggles: nine short lessons to help you understand and use every punctuation mark correctly! Scroll down to access your training.
The knowledge a minute-taker needs and the skill to apply it. This training doesn’t talk ‘about’ minutes, it’s designed to enable you to actually take them with information, worked examples, exercises and practical work. There are also templates, a glossary of terms and help with useful words and phrases for your minutes
Are you drowning under the weight of paperwork? Do you struggle to keep up with the quantity of papers that each meeting generates? Do you read the papers in the meeting, playing catch-up rather than keep-up? Improving your reading speed will save you time and improve your comprehension.
Sample lesson, introduction
SpeedReading will help you read fast and with good understanding. It’s important for meetings that you can have useful discussions and make good decisions, based on the papers provided.
It offers a variety of ways to read faster without losing comprehension, through a range of techniques with guidance to embed the skill and build speed.
Accredited by the CPD Standards Office
The days of, “Dear sir, thank you for your letter of…” may have long gone, taking shorthand with them, but the need to write fast in a variety of situations remains. Whether it’s minuting a meeting, taking a telephone message, noting instructions or note-taking in an interview, the ability to write quickly in a form that can easily be read back is invaluable.
Sample lesson, introduction
Modern day speedwriting uses only the letters of the alphabet; it is intuitive, flexible and easy to learn. With the techniques covered in bite-size sessions and incorporated into daily life, it becomes second nature when writing under pressure.
This training gives verbal guidance from an experienced trainer, supported by highly-professional animated examples and exercises. We’ve been running one-day courses in organisations for many years and bring that experience to this programme. Accredited by the CPD Standards Office.
Each of the links below will take you to a short video which explains the rules and guidelines for using each mark. There are examples throughout: keep your hand on the mouse and pause the video on these to look at how the punctuation is being used, maybe write a sentence of two using the mark correctly.
Joanna provides face-to-face and live, online courses to support effective meetings (minute-taking, chairing and report-writing), working across the UK in the NHS, local government and the private sector.
