Warning: Shameless Marketing

I promise not to make a habit of it.

Thank you for reading Calamus Words! Substack provides a place to collect ideas from a variety of aspects of my life, but Calamus Words is named after my business. As my business is centered on expression and writing, and I encourage my clients to show their writing, regardless of its purpose or stage, I feel obligated to show mine. This space is where I’ve chosen to do that. I’m a lucky guy because my work and my self-expression are directly linked.

Calamus Writing and Editing is deeply personal to me, in the obvious sense that it is me, but also because it began as an act of resistance to institutional opaqueness and the standardization of education. While Calamus offers a variety of services and resources, they are all united by individual attention and engagement.

I continue my work as a professor in traditional academia, but I want to reach more people on their own terms, not limit my teaching to existing structures. A decade after I first started working with individual clients outside of the classroom, I’m committed to expanding that reach.

The initial impulse behind the LLC was to coach, edit, and write for individual clients, engaging them on a personal level, not as data points in an algorithm. Clients often come to me through personal referrals, but also through my company website, where they can submit a sample for an editing estimate or get on my schedule for a consultation. Once they have initially reached out, we have a professional, direct relationship. We talk, email, and share documents as individuals, not through automation. When clients engage with Calamus, they are engaging with me directly.

As I continue to develop and actively expand Calamus Academy, I am driven by that idea. Calamus Academy courses involve some self-directed, uniform content, which helps me reach more people on their schedules, but every Calamus student receives feedback from my human brain and human fingers typing on a computer. Automation has many, many productive uses, but I continue to believe we should protect our person-to-person humanity. The kind of writing my clients do requires nuance that a nonhuman language model does not have. It’s also nice to maintain personal connection, especially when thinking through ideas and problems. It’s not called the “humanities” for nothing.

Calamus Academy classes are structured with prerecorded lessons and resources, but what makes them different for many online, self-paced courses, is that some key assignments come directly to me for suggestions and one-on-one instruction. So while you can complete a course  on your own time, at your own pace, you will also receive feedback directly from me, a human English professor. I’ve been teaching for decades now, so I know ways to provide learning that no automaton could ever approach.

Calamus Academy is in its infancy, but as it takes shape and grows, I am excited to see a means of providing convenience while preserving the humanness of learning.

That’s my pitch. Tell your friends. And then tell me what they say.