Chapter 1 establishes the primary intrigue surrounding professional speechwriters and other sorts of invisibilized language workers: namely, the complication of an author who is never animator nor principal of their labor (Goffman 1981). Here Mapes also lays out the theoretical cornerstones of her research: language in institutional and professional contexts; language work and wordsmiths; metadiscourse; and reflexivity and semiotic ideologies. This framework serves to address not only the ways in which workplace communication both establishes and contests particular communities of practice but also how larger issues related to metalinguistic awareness and political economy are implicated in these processes. Next, Mapes briefly maps the history of speechwriting as well as the relatively scant scholarly engagement with practitioners. She then turns to the specifics of her project, documenting the details of her data collection, method, and analytical process. The chapter concludes with an overview of the rest of the book, as well as an explanation of the three primary rhetorical strategies (invisibility, craft, and virtue) which arise in speechwriters’ metadiscursive accounts of their work.

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 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 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 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.

Contemporarily, economies are increasingly knowledge and service based, certainly in Canada and the United States. These services always implicate the necessity of language, and this is especially true in language-based service such as the work in call centers. This has led to the claim that language has been "commodified." This chapter examines the notion of the commodification of language. The argument is that if language and language practices must be analyzed through the language of commodification, then it is more productive to understand language as a fictitious commodity: something that is not produced or that does not exist for consumption through the market. Ultimately, what is referred to as the commodification of language is actually the commodification of labor, which should direct our concerns toward exploitation and alienation, not commodification.

Using a historical institutionalist approach, I demonstrate how institutionalized norms stemming from the liberal tradition in America have informed its language regime by tracing the path dependency of language policy and the critical junctures when changing norms lead to policy shifts. In the early republic, liberal norms enshrined in the Constitution informed a minimalist language regime. At the turn of the 19th century, norms shifted to reflect rapid industrialization and mass immigration, informing attempts at restrictive language policies. At the critical juncture of the civil rights movement, the monolingual language regime was challenged by new norms of what constituted a liberal democratic society. Neoliberal norms of the Reagan presidency facilitated the success of the English-only movement in changing language policies at the state-level. Neoliberal cosmopolitanism of the new millennium re-introduced minimal multilingual policy initiatives. I conclude by suggesting that Trump’s election represents a shift to nationalist, albeit possibly illiberal, norms.