The MacKellar Memo | August 2023
I’m BLUFing When I Talk About My Writing Skills
In news that would surprise absolutely no one, I want to share around an old Animalz blog post on the topic of BLUF, or bottom line up front. While I’m actually not going to follow their advice here and fully outline what BLUF is and how it should be applied to our writing, I will quickly sum it up by saying the idea is to put the most important details of the content piece upfront. Don’t make your readers dig and dig for the valuable info; just give it to them upfront. It’s not dissimilar from what we leared in journalism school, just adapted for the content marketing world we now live in.
The reason I’m using the BLUF blog post as my intro is because I also recently stumbled on this post from Jimmy Daly…an Animalz alumnus (surprise, surprise, I know). Jimmy’s article might actually be older than the BLUF blog post, but it got me thinking back to BLUF because it did a great job of capturing what happens to us “average” people when we write something, whether it’s a press release, a blog post or even an outline — we tend to write inverse of what the reader would, in theory, want to read.
What does that mean? It means we work through a logical (to us) flow while creating the initial outlined or first draft of whatever we’re writing in a way that justifies the topic to us. Jimmy calls this “sequential writing” in that it follows a logical sequence that anyone trying to solve a problem would have: identify the problem; explain why the problem exists; some sort of validation (third-party research, first-hand experience, etc.) to show that I am, in fact, not making this problem up; and finally how I propose I solve this problem.
The problem, as Jimmy so eloquently notes, is that this flow is logical for us, the person writing it, because we do not, in fact, have this problem. We are the ones helping to solve the problem. The person who has this problem is many steps ahead of where we were when we started this process — the reader already is aware of the problem, likely knows why it exists and almost assuredly has verified this is, in fact, a problem. How do we know this? Because they found their way here…to our proposed solution.
They want step four that Jimmy outlined, and they don’t want it in fourth position; they want it in position number one. Check out the image from Jimmy — the left version is what we “think” the article should look like; the right version is what the reader actually wants.
Which bring us back to BLUF. So consider this my official approval to BLUF your way through your next piece of content, whether you’re the one creating the outline, the one writing it or the one reviewing/editing.