Chapter 2 introduces readers to the three interconnected concepts which are key to speechwriters’ practices: 1) frontstage and backstage; 2) participation framework; and 3) production format (Goffman 1959, 1981). Next, Mapes maps the profession of speechwriting, using descriptive analysis to document practitioners’ education and career trajectories, production of deliverables, and day-to-day practices. This is followed by a second analytical section which outlines the rhetorical strategies of invisibility, craft, and virtue. First, Mapes uses interview data to unpack the specifics of invisibility as a point of professional pride and skill, demonstrating how speechwriters understand and even embrace the erasure of their authorship. Second, she documents the constructions of expertise and skill which characterize speechwriters’ craft, and which allow them to claim status as “creatives.” Lastly, Mapes details how virtue features across the dataset, arguing that it is necessarily tied to the cultural indexicalities associated with “impact.” In sum, this chapter sets the groundwork for understanding how speechwriters engage in the status competition characteristic of contemporary capitalism.

Chapter 5 examines how speechwriters’ claims to transgressive agency are a source for “affective binding” (see Comer 2022) and status production, contributing to the “virtuous outlaw” identity of the speechwriter community. Mapes’ focus here is rooted in affect studies (e.g. Ahmed 2004) and notions of emotional labor (e.g. Hochschild 2012), as well as the rather prolific scholarship concerning professional/personal identity as it emerges in workplace discourse (e.g. Holmes 2007). What comes to the fore is the way in which emotion is complicatedly entangled with the “semiotic ideologies” of one’s professional life (see again Keane 2018). Focusing on both Professional Speechwriting course materials as well as a video-recorded meeting between members of the Speechwriter Organization, Mapes demonstrates how participants characterize their professional expertise as especially superior to that of (hypothetical) speakers. In framing themselves as uniquely skilled and knowledgeable, speechwriters deem their transgressive professional practices as virtuous and admirable, allowing them to claim power and status within the neoliberal linguistic marketplace.

Chapter 6 explores how the business of speechwriting is necessarily caught up in the commodity chains of the market, and the ways in which status competition permeates high-end language work – including academia. After a brief section which summarizes the preceding chapters, Mapes identifies three overarching problems which her book helps to illuminate. These pertain to 1) political economy, field, and the marketplace; 2) folk linguistics; and 3) community-centered collaboration and consultation. As a means of further interrogating these specific issues, Mapes briefly analyzes data from her participation in a two-day Speechwriter Organization conference. Focusing on the ways in which practitioners both claim and contest their community membership, she identifies moments of solidarity building, and moments of individual status production. Across these two sections Mapes highlights speechwriters’ paradoxical struggle for legitimacy. They want their work to be acknowledged and valued, and yet it is only by operating and competing within the particular confines of their “field” (Bourdieu 2005 [2000]) that they can accumulate capital. Hence, in both avowing and disavowing ownership, power, and prestige, speechwriters demonstrate the real complexity of professionalized language work under neoliberal conditions.

This chapter outlines the ethnographic and qualitative methodology employed in this study. The methodological choices focus on understanding language ideologies in a multilingual setting. The study does not engage in a linguistic focus on speech patterns and instead emphasizes the cultural and social meanings that speakers attach to language. It challenges monolingual, Western-centric assumptions by exploring complex links between language and social structures. Data collection included interviews, field notes, observations, classroom recordings, and surveys on language use. The study uses grounded theory to analyse data, and it prioritizes speakers’ perspectives as experts of their own language culture. The chapter argues that decolonising research practices have to treat local language ideologies as legitimate frameworks rather than folk beliefs. A linguistic analysis examines public English, inspecting its variability and influence from both local and external norms. By integrating linguistic, cultural, and social data, the methodological approach provides a holistic view of how language ideologies emerge and intersect with broader social discourses.

This chapter synthesises the findings and discusses how sociomaterial processes shape languages. Challenging modernist linguistic paradigms, it examines how language categories emerge through diverse cultural, historical, and material practices. The chapter critiques binary linguistic models and universalist, teleological assumptions of standardisation, showing that stable linguistic systems are not ‘natural’, but result from specific sociopolitical and material conditions. In contrast, fluid linguistic practices in postcolonial and globalised contexts exhibit variability, innovation, and complex indexicality. Belize’s multilingual environment exemplifies a setting without a hegemonic linguistic centre, producing liquid linguistic norms. The chapter argues for decolonial approaches to linguistics that embrace heterogeneity and that challenge exclusionary, Eurocentric models. Ultimately, it positions fluid linguistic practices as a cultural avant-garde and understands postcolonial environments as inspiring insights into future global sociolinguistic orders shaped by digitalisation and transnationalism.

Chapter 4 unpacks the complex ways in which claims to craft emerge in speechwriters’ metadiscursive accounts of their work. As theoretical background Mapes considers the ways in which more ordinary instances of language play are necessarily distinct from the “exceptional” creativity which defines speechwriters’ work (see Swann and Deumert 2018). Relatedly, she turns to poetics (e.g. Jakobson 1960) to examine how speechwriters exemplify a spectacular, institutionalized expression of the aesthetic or artistic dimensions of language. The subsequent analysis draws primarily on speechwriter memoirs and interviews to investigate the the microlinguistic choices which characterize speechwriters’ claims to artistry; their emphasis on persuasion as creative practice; and their proclivity for formulating themselves as distinctly neoliberal “bundles of skills” (e.g. Holborrow 2018). This chapter thereby demonstrates how poetics/creativity are used as key status-making strategies by which speechwriters shore up their privilege vis-à-vis peers and other language workers.

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.

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.