B.L.U.F. is an acronym that stands for “Bottom Line Up Front”.

BLUF is a short paragraph where the conclusions and recommendations are placed at the beginning of the text, rather than the end, in order to facilitate rapid decision making.

I learned to use the “BLUF method” as an Officer in the United States Air Force.  I worked with many military commanders from various U.S. military branches, as well as coalition forces.  The majority of those commanders didn’t have time to read through and digest long, complex explanations of time-sensitive subjects; so they just wanted to know the most important and pressing item at the beginning of the communication (usually email).

One of my pet peeves is reading a very interesting headline (i.e. “This is the Best Thing Ever”), and then having to sift through an entire article of “fluff” that really adds nothing to the content.  I understand that one reason for this style of writing comes from traditional writing guidelines for books and periodicals (newspapers, etc).  I also understand that the reason for this writing style in the modern era (websites, etc) is to create “metadata” in the document in order to increase the searchability rate and getting more google hits.  However, like the military commanders I mentioned above, our lives are complex and we need to know what we need to know and move on.  If we have time to take a “deep dive” into the material, then so be it.

For these reasons, “B.L.U.F.” will be the title of my website’s Blog.  Generally, I will have a lot of legal articles offering insight into current legal topics, but I will also add some off-topic posts for entertainment purposes, as well.

I hope you enjoy! 🙂

– Josh R.