Business life and personal creativity or I used to brilliant

Business is bad for good writing.

Following a chain of blog posts — Seth Godin in his post linked to this post, which linked to this post — I read an old essay by Paul McHenry Roberts.  Reading it, I thought to myself, I used to be able to think, write and otherwise express myself like that — I used to be brilliant.  As a teenager in Mother Russia I would compose stand-up comedy acts, doing pretty good impressions of Mikhail Gorbachev.  As the same teenager I would write atrocious poetry, imagining myself the next Sergei Yesenin or Alexander Blok.

Even in Canada and America I maintained similar albeit diminished aspirations.  But it was not to be — I did a 180 turn and went to college.

What do I write now?  Proposals, emails, performance reviews and memos of understanding.  I fear that the late Mr. Paul Roberts would have difficult time understanding my Memos of Understanding or Statements of Work and would argue over sentences like “… network utilization analysis, focusing on specific aspects of server configuration, which may lead to instances of less than optimal performance…”

I no longer feel capable of putting together a presentation on why senior citizens should be restricted from driving during the rush hour.  (A presentation that I did years ago for a public speaking workshop.) I have lost the ability to sling verses, even the really bad ones.  The life of business and business writing have wrung my brains dry of creativity.  Reading business books and trade rags has rendered me oblivious to joys of poetry, unable to comprehensibly recite iambic tetrameters.

I have to admit that my business writing is good.  But the rest of my writing is hardly what it used to be.

On the flip side, I find that many people in business simply cannot write.  It is on a daily basis that I read horribly written emails, proposals and other materials plagued with run-on sentences, lack of punctuation and convoluted meaning.

It’s a vicious cycle out there.  People in business read business and technical literature.  They read trade rags and blogs.  They don’t read well-written literature and poetry.  As the result, their writing skills follow the dialectics’ principles of changes moving in spirals. Only in this case, the writing skills of today’s businessmen are moving in a downward spiral — they are deteriorating.