Come, again?

I've been taking notes in meetings for a couple of years now.  Through this experience, a few things have become evident.  One is that people are simply not good at listening to each other. 

In almost all meetings that I've taken notes for people repeat themselves and others constantly...and the funny thing is...they always think their idea is original (even though someone else made the same point a few minutes earlier).  It's never so evident as when you are taking verbatim notes for a meeting

Here's an example:
10:35am - Participant 1 says under her breath, 'Man, I really want pizza...we should have that for lunch'
10:43am - Participant 2 says to the group, 'I heard that Little Caesars is really good, and think we should have pizza for lunch.'
10:52am - Participant 3 says, 'I have a great idea, let's have lunch and let's go to Little Caesars...for some reason...I have a craving for pizza.'
10:59 - Participant 4, 'So we're having lunch at Little Caesars today right?'  All others reply 'I don't think we agreed on that...don't we need to make these decisions as a group?'

It's no wonder that meetings are so useful and productive!  We rarely listen to each other, or ourselves for that matter!

Also, even those people who are extremely well-written are not necessary well-spoken.  The poor grammar in spoken sentences is astounding.  When I go back to read my verbatim notes, I can hardly understand what the people are trying to say because there are so many inside out and upside down sentences.