This chapter discusses how UX writers claim elite status through discursive processes of professionalization and skilling. In this case, I am specifically interested in how UX writers as members of a relatively new and emerging professional group define and legitimize their (language) work. The chapter draws on critical sociolinguistic research on language work as well as scholarship in the sociology of professions to examine how UX writers discursively legitimize and professionalize their own work. In my analysis, I observe the construction, codification, and indexing of ’writing-as-designing’ as a (supposedly) unique skill in UX writing, arguing that it is the (dis)avowal of skills through which UX writers can establish their professional field, a practice that is always also connected to particular value judgements. Ultimately, I connect this case study to broader questions of language work, suggesting that in order to understand not just the elite language work of UX writers but also hierarchies of language work more generally, it can be fruitful to broaden such scholarship with a view to professionalization and skilling.

This chapter provides a comprehensive account of UX writing as a contemporary domain of elite language work. I first discuss existing literature on UX writing, showing that while scholars have discussed at large how users interact with digital media, there is considerably less work on how language is used by producers. After this brief survey, I offer an in-depth introduction to UX writing in three parts. First, I provide a broad mapping of the profession, where I discuss the history and origins of UX writing. Next, I give an introduction to UX writers’ language work, illustrating how their work is both centrally concerned with writing interface texts and much more complex than that. Finally, I turn to some initial ethnographic observations about UX writers’ concrete text production. In this last regard, I am particularly interested in how UX writers mobilize (meta)linguistic knowledge in their work, arguing that they are not just language workers but also language experts. Overall, the chapter thus offers a first description of the work and profession of UX writers, orienting primarily to these wordsmiths’ own views and understandings of what it is that they do.

This final, concluding chapter of the book offers a reflection on what the production of digital media reveals about the cultural politics of these technologies. Drawing together the threads developed in the previous chapters, and especially UX writers’ own theorizations of language, I discuss the normative dimensions of interface design and make the case for a posthumanist approach to language in digital media interfaces. My central argument is simple: regardless of how people choose to use digital media, the software itself always posits an ideal way of using it – it entails an inbuilt ideal users have to respond to, even if that response is to contest the norm the software produces. In this way, focusing on the production of interface texts provides a valuable perspective on the broader cultural politics of digital media by theorizing UX writers, software, and users as part of a complex sociotechnical assemblage rather than as individual, disconnected agents.

This chapter investigates the normative impact of UX writers’ language work by discussing how they craft particular audiences through their work. As such, this chapter turns to the textual products that UX writers create. My analysis focuses on a particularly impactful example of this work, the texts produced for cookie consent notices. Examining the kinds of audiences and addressees that surface in and through these texts, I suggest, can help scholars consider how digital media entail not just traditional notions of audience design but also a more explicit and active crafting of audiences, whereby some people are constructed as audiences and others not. Specifically, I discuss how automated participant roles, the stylization of users, as well as the design of imposed interaction lead to an encoding of both specific participant roles as well as particular social identities in software interfaces. Ultimately, I suggest that this may be understood as a form of symbolic violence, whereby the software interface is used as a means to impose not just an interaction order but also a particular social order onto users.

This chapter offers an introduction to UX writing and to the theoretical framing of the book. First, I outline my understanding of digital media as cultural-political artefacts, drawing attention to the fact that digital media are not neutral but inscribed with particular norms and identities. I establish this position by reviewing literature from digital discourse studies, media and communication studies, cultural studies of technology, as well as posthumanism, placing particular emphasis on software interfaces as designed sites where power is exercised. This brings me to the second part of my theoretical framing: how language is taken up as a resource in the design of software interfaces. In this regard, I orient to critical sociolinguistic scholarship on language work. I briefly outline my position in this field, aligning with scholarship that orients to Bourdieu’s conceptualization of capital and the linguistic marketplace. Additionally, I reflect on the status of UX writers as elite language workers or wordsmiths and how such (more) privileged language work hinges on its behind-the-scenes nature while nonetheless being instrumental in shaping social norms and values.

This chapter addresses the interplay of invisibility, status, and power in UX writing. My aim in the chapter is twofold. First, I am interested in how UX writers understand and negotiate the (in)visibility of language in their own work. Tracing the semiotic ideologies of these professional language workers, I discuss how UX writers operationalize a discursive ideal of invisible writing in order to establish the value of their linguistic work vis-à-vis their colleagues, who typically privilege other modes of meaning making. Second, I examine how UX writers make sense of the linguistic and cultural-political consequences of this invisibility. In this regard, I suggest that the ideal of an invisible interface is a central media ideology that not only structures the work of UX writers but ultimately determines how ordinary users can(not) communicate with and through digital media. I conclude by linking my case study to broader discussions of invisibility in cultural studies of technology, arguing that communication with and through digital media is shaped not only by users’ perspectives but also by the semiotic and media ideologies of its producers.

This chapter examines how UX writers demarcate their own profession by differentiating it from other kinds of language work, with a particular view to how UX writers frame their work as creative or not. Following recent scholarship in sociocultural linguistics, I argue that creativity is not just a technical, linguistic accomplishment but also a discursive strategy. Drawing on interview data, I discuss how these elite language workers strategically deploy discourses of creativity to fashion their professional identity. In my analysis, I show how it is not just their claims to creativity but also – or perhaps especially – their claims to non-creativity that matter for demarcating both their language work and their position or status vis-à-vis other language workers. I end by connecting my case study to the broader question of status and privilege in language work, arguing that an analysis of the rhetorics of creativity can help sociocultural linguists better understand hierarchies within and between different kinds of language work.