Chapter 3 focuses on the notion of invisibility by tracking the life of a political speech from assignment to delivery. Mapes’ theoretical framework for this analysis comprises three interrelated concepts: language materiality (Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012), or the ways in which language and material objects are complicatedly entwined and consequently a matter of political economy; text trajectories (e.g. Lillis 2008), as in the processes that facilitate a text’s evolution; and entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990), the de- and recontextualization of language. Following Macgilchist and Van Hout’s (2011) ethnographic approach to documenting text trajectories, the analysis is divided into three case studies which together demonstrate speechwriters’ strategic and material erasure throughout the evolution of their deliverables. Ultimately, Mapes concludes by arguing that this ethnographic text trajectory evidence is another indication of the ways in which language workers must discursively enact Urciuoli’s (2008) “new worker-self” in order to claim status and success as wordsmiths.