The Community Blog for Business Analysts

I think putting your own thoughts into things is a very important part of being a Business Analyst. Also, I don't think our role is to write down things people say. You need to understand the business needs, then gleen the business requirements from that and make sure that developers and testers have sufficient context to understand the requirements. Some of the work can be tedious, but I find it highly satisfying if there is a business issue to fully understand that issue and to translate that into requirements which everyone then agrees with (hopefully :-) ).
You can't know what people need if they don't tell you what their challenges are, so the most important thing is to get those stakeholders to open up to you and let you know what pain points they face and what they are looking for in terms of Success Criteria. When you know these things, you can start articulating business requirements and validate those with your stakeholders. Requirement elicitation should be a two way conversation in my view.