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.

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.