Unit 4 Summaries, notes, reports
4.1 Summarizing a conversation
4.1 B
Norman: How do you do, my name is Bob Norman. I'm with Rotaflex. Can I help you in any way?
Brown: Oh, hi. My name's Tim Brown. How're you doing? Pleased to meet you.
Norman: I'm fine...fine thanks and how about yourself?
Brown: Fine, thanks. I wanted to ask you about your rotary printer you have here.
Norman: Ah, yes, now you mean our R75.
Brown: Yes, that's right the R75. Now, what I'd like to know is can it deal with high quality embossed greeting cards?
That's the sort of thing we're involved with.
Norman: Certainly. That's no problem at all.
Brown: Fine. Now...you see we're looking for replacements for our twenty-year-old machines.
Norman: Mmhmm.
Brown: So we need the latest technology. Now, if we were interested in making a firm order,
how quickly could you deliver the machines?
Norman: Well, I can't give you a firm delivery date myself at this moment.
But we can deliver pretty quickly.
Brown: My firm would be interested in ten machines.
Norman: Yes. Oh, that's very good.
Brown: So I was wondering, could we get a 15% discount on an order that size?
Norman: Well...er...as you can see from our catalogue here,
we normally offer 12% on orders of that kind.
Brown: Yeah, yeah, I read that. But your neighbours down the hall there,
they're willing to give me 15%.
Norman: Well, of course, we'd er...be delighted to do business with you, Mr Brown.
And so, I'd like to draw your attention to the latest laser-driven technology which the R75 contains.
Brown: Yes, very interesting, but the discount is important.
Norman: Look, if you'd like to wait just for a few minutes er...I can get through to my head office
and I'll enquire about any special arrangements which we might be able to make for you.
Brown: No, no, please don't bother about that just now.
There's not that much of a hurry. I still have to report back to my board.
Norman: Oh, yes, I understand that.
Brown: Look here's my card. It'll the quite enough if you just drop me a line about things
like the discount in the course of the next two weeks.
Norman: Yes, of corse, yes er...very well, Mr Brown.
I'd be only too pleased to do all that for you.
It's been very pleasent talking to you.
Norman: Oh, and here's my card as well.
And that is the end 4.1 B.
4.4 Making notes
4.4 B
1. It's about that order for billingham's, John...Yeah.
Er...their buyer rang to say they were willing to taken ten more sets of the 532,
because well it's really been so effective in their new processing system...Mm,
yes, that's right... Yes,
they're been able to cut their production time by nearly a third...Haha.
Yes, it's good news, isn't it?
Well, if you can get the stuff out and delivered by the end of the month,
it could well mean that the div...the division will get an increase in the monthly bonus...
well I'm sure they'll all be glad to hear that!
2. Hello there, this is Bob Billingham speaking...Ha, yeah, yeah,
I'm...er I'm just calling to let you know about my time of arrival.
Er...let's see, I'm coming in on flight CK532 next Thursday...Yeah,
yeah it gets in at...er... 17.10...Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good news, isn't it?...
Yeah, I was hoping to come on the third of the month but...er... I had to postpone my trip for nearly a month.
We've had so many problems with that new processing system.
You know what I mean...Mm...yeah anyway,
er...anyway...I...I can tell you all about that next week,ok,
Mm...No, your division is going to have to help us out there...Ha,
yeah, yeah, I'm afraid that's...that's the case.
Right so...er...if you can be thinking about that...
3. Mm, but what we've got to do is find out what went wrong with the last payment.
Er...now...er...I've been looking at the file for CKs and it seems as though
we were billing them for two batches of T140s last month instead of one.
Well, this may be how the misunderstanding arose...Well, yes, exactly.
That could be how the...er...the 532 figure came up.
Now lock, what I suggest is that we send them new invoice with the batch next month and simply deduct the extra amount from the total...
And that is the end 4.4 B
4.4 D
Speaker: ...Now, then, I'd like to move on from taking notes
(of what happened in a meeting or at a lecture)and to making notes using the technique of 'pattern notes'.
In the first place we usually make notes to prepare or plan some kind of writing, don't we?
One of the ways one can do this is sing what we call 'pattern notes'.
It's a kind of individual brainstorming session,
where you try to note down ideas as they occur to you
and you show the way that they connect up.
So one of the things you could probably do is to take a clean piece of paper
and start with a topic you want to talk about written large in the middle.
Mm...right in the middle of the sheet of paper.
You can put a circle round this item, if you'd like to.
And then the different aspects of the topic will form your first set of branches.
So when you've got your first set of branches the ideas begin to emerge,
to develop some of these further.
And, where you've got no ideas at all,
there's a clear sign that certain aspects of the topic are either irrelevant or need to be thought about a little more.
I suppose pattern notes are particularly useful because they're much quicker to produce
than the conventional variety and they allow your mind to focus on the ideas without worrying about the correctness of the language you use.
So you can note down ideas about different aspects of the topic as they occur to you
and you can spot connections and contradictions since everything is laid out on the one page.
You can, of course, mark these with arrows and question marks
and there's no need to get into any complex arguments.
Oh, and perhaps...perhaps I ought to add that psychologists also believe that
they reflect the way we think more closely than the kinds of organized notes that
run neatly down the page from the top to the bottom or...or from the left to the right.
You don't normally think about sigle ideas in sequence,
rather you deal in whole groups and clusters of ideas - all at the same time.
Some of this is done consciosly and some of this is done unconsciously.
And once you feel comfortable about doing these pattern notes-
oh,and some people do feel very uneasy about dealing with what they first feel is...is
an unstructured approach - and...and I don't want to underestimate this aspect -
pattern notes shouldn't slow down your thinking as much as convertional note-making.
I believe that such notes can also be very useful for recording a fast moving discussion as the basis for minutes or a report to be written afterwards.
So they also do have their use as a note-taking technique.
So, as discussion jumps from topic to topic you don't have to keep, well,
shuffling your notes from page to page to write extra points in.
And that is the end 4.4 D.