In roaring cataracts down Andes’ channelled steeps
Mark how enormous Orellana sweeps!
—Joseph Wharton, “The Amazon”
When I read this poem, during my first year at Penn, that Joseph Wharton wrote after a business trip to the Amazon, I thought nothing of it. Oh nice, I thought, he had a creative escape from all those financial statements and memos.
It took me until my second fall semester to really understand it. Around that time, I declared my creative writing minor and took my first class for it: a course on translating and writing poetry. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, but due to the sheer numbers and objectivity of my finance and accounting classes, I sought a creative outlet.
At a school as interdisciplinary as Penn, it can feel impossible to connect the different parts of my education into one coherent thing. I put up a mental wall between these two parts of my education — I wanted my left brain for Wharton classes and right brain for Kelly Writer’s House. I only realized how hindering that mindset was once I took Wharton’s business communication course.
“My issue wasn’t that business was an uncreative profession—it was that I wasn’t thinking about business creatively.”
I remember one of the most agonizing parts of that course being a business email. Over the course of three weeks, I kept on making mistakes that I thought were tiny. The feedback felt tedious: commas were misplaced, my paragraphs had too many sentences, my sentences were too long.
I started synthesizing and thinking of my email as a really odd poem. I began to think about these things as enjambment and rhythm, of my email as a set of poetic techniques that could coalesce into very precise meaning and intention. I had to think about language spatially, and in the same ways I wanted to write stories, I thought about everything from interview answers to PowerPoint slides as things that required mastery of narrative.
My issue wasn’t that business was an uncreative profession — it was that I wasn’t thinking about business creatively.
I realized that writing, like business, is an exercise of form and resulting function. “I don’t care if you did it on accident,” one of my creative writing professors said during every class. “You have to tell me why you did it.”
Misplaced language can move global markets
Take, for example, the concept of “Fed speak.” In 2023, J.P. Morgan created an A.I. tool that analyzed 25 years of speeches and memos to see how simple changes in sentence structure and language could signal changes in interest rates. Precise language isn’t just useful, but consequential; misplaced language can move global markets.
As part of the Huntsman Program in International Studies & Business, I was required to take advanced courses in my target language, Spanish. I took a Spanish literature course that counted for my creative writing minor and courses related to business. While I was relatively proficient in Spanish, it was difficult. Easy sentences in English felt impossible to articulate in Spanish without explicitly thinking about translations for every word.
When I took Business Spanish, I read about business issues, wrote management analyses, and presented marketing strategies in Spanish. These would have been relatively uncomplicated in English, but in Spanish, I was forced to slow down significantly. I thought about every single word, its meaning, and effect. I had to become intentional about everything I was saying because I couldn’t say it on autopilot. I had to do it word by word.
I came back to my Wharton courses thinking more slowly about the next word before speaking. In my business classes prior, I spoke without thinking, sometimes saying things without knowing what they meant. I never stopped to think how business impacted me and the world around me.
It made my business education more human and meaningful to have reflected so intentionally; the challenge at Wharton isn’t just figuring out what story to tell but also knowing the right way to say it.
When I speak in Spanish and do creative writing exercises (and occasionally both at the same time), I feel myself interrogating every meaning. Is this what I actually want to say? And will somebody understand it that way? It’s a really tedious way to think about business, so granular that sometimes I’m worried that I’ll lose the forest for the trees. In my weird way, though, it’s all poetry, and all poetry might just be a memo.
—Alex Zhou, C’25, W’25
Posted: May 27, 2025
Belinda Kumi, W’25, from Georgia
Dylan Kang, W’27, from Los Angeles
