C2 · 370 Wörter · 3 Min.
The Minutes
Eine Sitzung, in der nichts beschlossen wurde, und ein Protokoll, das genau das festhält.
Ein Text über die Sprache der Verwaltung und darüber, was sie verbirgt. Er benutzt sie und zerlegt sie im selben Absatz — achten Sie darauf, wie oft das Passiv hier einen fehlenden Urheber verdeckt.
The meeting lasted two hours and ten minutes and produced no decision, which was neither anybody's intention nor anybody's fault. Four things had to be settled in a particular order, and the first of them could not be settled until a figure arrived that had been requested three weeks earlier and was not expected before the following Monday.
What the room did instead was discuss the second, third and fourth items conditionally, on the assumption that the figure would be one of two values. This was not wasted effort. It meant that when the figure came, the remaining decisions could be taken by circulation rather than in a room.
The difficulty lay in recording it. A minute that says the committee considered items two to four and reached no conclusion is accurate, useless and, in six months, actively misleading: it will be read as evidence that the committee was unable to decide, which is the opposite of what happened.
Roskilde, who took the minutes, wrote instead a paragraph setting out both branches, naming the figure that would decide between them, and stating in a single sentence what would follow in each case. It ran to less than a page and it took her most of an afternoon.
Emeka, reading it a year later in circumstances nobody had foreseen, was able to establish in ten minutes what the committee had thought, what it had been waiting for and why the eventual decision had gone the way it did. No other document from that year permits anything of the kind.
The convention that grew out of this is unglamorous and has survived four changes of chair. Where a meeting reaches no decision, the minute records the condition on which the decision turns, in terms specific enough that a reader who was not present can tell whether that condition has since been met.
It is worth saying what this does not solve. It does not make meetings shorter, it does not prevent the figure from arriving late, and it places a demand on the person taking the minutes that not everyone can meet. What it does is stop a year of careful conditional thinking from disappearing into a sentence that says nothing happened.
Ein Klick auf ein Wort schlägt es im Wortschatz dieser Seite nach.
- Wörter
- 370
- Sätze
- 16
- Wörter je Satz
- 23,1
- im Wortschatz
- 100 %
- gemessene Stufe
- C2
- Lesedauer
- 3 Min.
Die Wörter ab C2 in diesem Text
Nicht die schweren Wörter überhaupt, sondern die Ihrer Stufe: alle 2 von 188 Wörtern dieses Textes stehen auf C2 oder darüber. Alles andere kennen Sie, wenn Sie hier angekommen sind.
case
Gehäuse
C2
reading
Lesart
C2
Die Wortlisten zu diesem Text
Die Wörter dieses Textes stehen in 46 Listen dieser Seite; die Zahl dahinter sagt, wie viele davon aus welcher Liste kommen. Wer den Text gelesen hat, hat gerade diese Wörter gebraucht — und kann genau sie abfragen.
Verständnisfragen
3 Fragen zum Text. Zu jeder Antwort erscheint der Satz, in dem sie steht — eine Frage, deren Antwort man im Text nicht wiederfindet, prüft nichts.
1. Warum konnte der erste Punkt nicht entschieden werden?
a figure arrived that had been requested three weeks earlier
2. Was wäre am Satz „kein Ergebnis" das Problem gewesen?
is accurate, useless and, in six months, actively misleading
3. Was hält die Konvention seither fest?
the minute records the condition on which the decision turns