Common Phrasal Verbs for Formal Business Meetings

Many of my English coaching clients love my blog posts about phrasal verbs because they recreate real situations instead of presenting them with artificial textbook examples.

Due to popular demand, let’s dive back into more phrasal verbs. I simply love when my clients feel more at ease with their English because they’ve increased their vocabulary in terms of how native speakers actually speak.

Now, imagine you’ve been asked to attend a meeting, you will have to talk about scheduling…

The date and time is set and you put it (schedule it) on your calendar. Occasionally you might have to move up (make it earlier) the time of the meeting so that everyone can make it. You might also have to push it back to a later date. Then imagine that you get a call from a colleague to say that something has come up (happened unexpectedly) and you decide the meeting has to be moved to a different day. No big deal (no problem). In a way you are relieved because you are slammed/swamped at work (you have a mountain of work) and you were concerned that you might have had to call off (cancel) the meeting.

During the meeting you bring up (mention) some issues that need to be dealt with (managed). With some issues, you might have to weigh up (think carefully about) their upsides and downsides. To get more input (feedback) here, you might ask your colleagues to join in (participate) the discussion and bounce ideas off of each other (brainstorm/exchange ideas).

Sometimes you need to look into (to investigate/research) a matter before making a final decision. If that’s the case, you might take/write down (write down something short) all the points raised during the meeting. Please note, for example: you write articles, reports, etc. but you write down someone’s phone number.

Some people don’t like to be interrupted when they’re talking, while others don’t mind if someone steps in (interrupts) with their ideas. Sometimes you have to cut someone off (interrupt) especially when he/she (here you can also say they) was/were going on (continuing without stopping) about something completely irrelevant.

There is always someone in a meeting who just keeps going on and on (talking too much) about something that no one else is interested in. I often tell my colleagues that we need to move on (continue with the next item) to the other items on our agenda, especially since there’s nothing worse than a meeting that drags on (continues for far too long), right?