A generated meeting summary is a transcript with the sentences polished. It is chronological, it is complete, and that is exactly why nobody reads it. The update people act on leads with decisions and puts the discussion underneath.
Generated summaries preserve the order of the meeting, so a decision made at minute forty lands in paragraph six. Anyone who reads the first screen learns what was discussed, not what changed, and has to read to the end to find out whether anything affects them.
Invert it. Decisions first, then open questions, then context. The context is for the two people who were not in the room and will read the whole thing anyway.
Four steps, and they can be done on the summary itself:
The result is usually a fifth of the original length, and takes about ten minutes once you have done it twice.
Generated summaries quietly tidy away conflict, and that is where the useful information is: which option was rejected and why, what the estimate is now instead of what it was, who disagreed. A reader who does not know the counter-argument will raise it again in a week, which is the most expensive way to learn it.
Write the rejected option in one plain sentence. Nobody is embarrassed by a sentence; they are embarrassed by an argument reopened in front of the whole team.
| What people usually write | What it looks like after |
|---|---|
| The team discussed various options regarding the migration timeline and considered the trade-offs involved in each approach. | Migration moves to November. We rejected doing it in October because the payments code cannot be frozen during the sale. |
| It was noted that further investigation may be required to determine the root cause of the issue. | The duplicate emails are unassigned. Priya has the log from Tuesday but nobody owns the fix, I will name an owner on Thursday if it is still open. |
| Participants shared updates on their respective workstreams and aligned on next steps. | Two things shipped: the new pricing page and the refund fix. The referral programme is paused until payments stops dropping orders. |
If you want this done to your own draft: ShipCopy takes a piece of text you already wrote and rewrites it in one of three modes — rewrite it to read human, turn a product description into launch copy, or turn a plain-language request into a reusable prompt. Six output formats, 13 languages. 10 generations free, no card.
See what it does Pricing — US$15/monthYes, as a link at the bottom, for the two people who want the detail. Anything above the fold should be decisions.
One screen. If it runs past that, the meeting probably needed a second pass rather than a longer summary.
Say that in line one. 'No decisions today; the open question is X' is a useful update, and it stops people re-reading for one.
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