BLUF, Appendicies, and AI - Writing documents in the age of AI
What, Why, and How are how we communicate. In important scenarios, put the WHAT first. Add in WHY and HOW after. Make it easy for someone to see your point or request, give your reasoning later.
You have to assume that any document that you put together is going to go through an LLM. Every slide deck, rundown, email, or whatever else, is going to be put through an LLM for summarization & distillation. Whether your opinion of these tools are good or bad, it’s inevitable.
I’m holding some hope, though, that not all is lost. I think more and more, people will still want to come to their own conclusions before fully relying on an LLM to give them an opinion. Again, I’m holding hope. It is, at the very least, what I still do.
For these reasons, it’s more important than ever, to adjust how information is presented.
Bottom Line Up Front
The idea has been around, probably, for longer than I’ve been alive. Well, at least since the dawn of PowerPoint. With it’s origins in military communication, BLUF is “…the practice of beginning a message with its key information (the “bottom line”)” Wikipedia. The intention is to allow the person who is receiving the information to make faster decisions.
We’ve seen this exact same thing (though, usually at the bottom of a long post) in the form of “TL;DR” — a short synopsis of a long ass post/email/document/etc. It’s common these days to distill an amount of information to just the important bits, to get to the point without all the background, context, and caveats. Research papers start with an abstract. Our communications in important situations should follow the same.
We’re bombarded by information now. X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, News, Youtube… the list is exhuasting even to type out. BLUF gives you the what right in your face. The Why and How come later.
The Context
The rest of the information is still critical. Why you need what you need, why you are making the statement(s) you are, how you came to those conclusions, how you did your research… it’s all just as important. But for someone who just needs to know what to do, or someone who is being bombarded by information, it plays second fiddle to WHAT you need.
There is still a place for this information. In my day to day, I’ve moved a lot of this information to appendicies. My BLUF items get references to line items in my appendicies. Everything has a reference.
AI Summarization
Like I said — you have to assume that everything you send to someone is going to be put through some sort of AI sumamrization. It may be hyperbole today, but I don’t think the future where we just receive summarization information rather than the full context. Someone’s AI is going to write something, and then they’re going to send it, and the reciever’s AI is going to summarize it for them (or even act on that information on their behalf).
BLUF puts the thing at the top. Right in the face of whomever (or whatever) is going to be reading this. But with the appendicies, the recipient can still go back and understand the context.
With an appendix that has references, a human or an LLM can get the Why or How behind something very easily. Again, the assumption is that whomever receives the information will open, skim, then pass to an LLM for conversational summarization.
For example, a slide I put together about key takeaways from a coaching session would have 3-5 bullets of one sentence themes with references in square brackets. Then, in my appendix on the last slide(s) I’ll have a line that starts with that reference number with a deeper explanation of that item.
- Retention, engagement, and career clarity remain active themes [1]
…
[1] - In some cases, organizational misalignment and uncertainty around role direction influenced engagement and decision-making. This has been noted across several coach session logs.
Put the important stuff up front. Make it easy for anyone, or anything, to get the information you need them to have right away. But don’t lose the context, it’s still critically valuable.