Style guide — meeting notes
TopicFrom the PointSav Documentation
Editorial standards for meeting notes in the platform (COMMS genre): header fields, agenda discipline, decisions-versus-notes distinction, and the action-items table format.
Meeting notes exist for the action items and the decisions. Everything else is archive material.
Meeting notes (COMMS genre) record what was decided and what happens next in a meeting. They are not a transcript. A reader who was absent reads the notes to learn the outcome and their obligations — not to reconstruct the conversation. For decisions that carry architectural weight, a formal ADR is the right artifact, not meeting notes. This article is the human-facing standard; the machine-readable counterpart lives in service-disclosure/templates/meeting-notes.toml.
[edit]When to use this template
Use meeting notes for any meeting that produces decisions or action items. Short informal check-ins that produce neither do not need notes — a chat message to the channel suffices. Notes are required when:
- A decision is made that affects scope, timeline, or ownership of work.
- An action item is assigned to a named person.
- A question is left open and needs to be tracked to resolution.
[edit]Structure
Header block (before any heading):
Meeting: <descriptive title — not "Sync" or "Check-in">
Date: <YYYY-MM-DD>
Attendees: <names or roles, comma-separated>
| Section | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Agenda | The topics listed going in. One item per line. Marked with ✓ if covered, — if deferred. |
| Decisions | A bulleted list of discrete decisions made. Each bullet names the decision and is self-contained — readable without the Notes context. |
| Action items | A table: Owner | Action | Due. One row per item. If no date was set, Due is TBD — not blank. |
| Notes | Optional. Context that supports the decisions or action items. This section is archive material — compress aggressively. Three sentences is usually sufficient; more than ten suggests a memo is warranted. |
[edit]Register and tone
Decisions are phrased as completed facts: "Agreed: X will ship on 2026-07-01" rather than "We discussed shipping X." Action items use imperative form ("Write the draft proposal") and name a specific owner. "TBD" is acceptable for due dates; "someone" is not acceptable for owners.
The Notes section is prose-minimal. It exists for context, not for narrative — do not transcribe the discussion.
Sentence-length budget: mean around twenty words for prose sections. The Decisions and Action items sections use fragments where clarity permits.