Gwynne Mapes considers the labour of US speechwriters as part of language work of high-end professionals in late capitalism, or ‘wordsmiths’ (Thurlow Reference Thurlow2019). This is a departure from the traditional sociolinguistic focus on the language labour (either official or unofficial) of relatively low-salaried employees of call centres and baggage handlers (though see, for example, Woydack (Reference Woydack2019) on middle-management call centre agents, and Barakos (Reference Barakos2021) on elite language trainers).
The book examines and theorises the language ‘culture’ of political speechwriters as a distinguishing ‘way of speaking’, a kind of linguistic badge or emblem of this professional group, and their own beliefs about how they should speak and write to accomplish their vocation. To put it in somewhat more technical terms, Mapes teases out the enregistered genre of speechwriters’ metadiscourses as an index of their professional identity and their underlying semiotic ideologies.
The analysis is embedded in well-established sociolinguistic narratives of a shift in Western economies in the second half of the twentieth century from the Fordist to information-based economies, which fostered new areas of commodification of labour, especially language labour. Various researchers have referred to the new communication-oriented professions as ‘new work order’ (Gee, Hull, & Lankshear Reference Gee, Hull and Lankshear1996), ‘affective labour’ (Arlie Hochschild), ‘wordforce’ (Monica Heller), ‘talking work’ (Iedema & Scheeres Reference Iedema2003), all present in the book, except perhaps Boutet’s (Reference Boutet2001) ‘language workers’ (travailleurs du langage), recently usefully made available to non-francophone researchers as Boutet (Reference Boutet2025).
The core of Mapes’ analytic toolkit is constituted by Erving Goffman’s foundational concepts such as frontstage and backstage areas; production format (renamed by Stephen Levinson as ‘production roles’); participation framework (renamed by Levinson as ‘reception roles’), including author, animator, and principal. Mapes navigates her analyses across the paradoxes and requirements of frontstage performances by the animators-principals (clients, speakers, politicians), and the backstage linguistic toil of the authors (speechwriters). Mapes anchors her Goffmanesque take on speechwriters’ communicative practices in the methodological principles of linguistic ethnography, reflexivity, semiotic ideology, metadiscourse, and the vast tradition of workplace communication.
Mapes’ dataset is rich and analytically rewarding, made even more impressive by the host of adverse circumstances related to the covid pandemic, which inadvertently engulfed the author’s fieldwork. Thankfully, she managed to secure access to her participants and other data sources: meetings, archives, libraries, and so on. On this note, let me mention briefly a rather minor point. Rather than treating all of her data as part of her ethnography, Mapes chose to divide her data into ‘primary’ (e.g. face-to-face and virtual interviews; participant observation), and ‘secondary’ (one speechwriter’s YouTube address to university students followed by a QA session; speechwriters’ memoirs). To my mind, this distinction is not particularly relevant nor clearcut. All of these data types make useful appearances across the book rounding of the study in a compelling way.
An example of one striking dataset examined in the book is a mysterious Box 3—a virtual set of files purportedly containing ‘speech drafts’ by President George W. Bush, housed at the George W. Bush Library and Museum in Dallas, Texas (chapter 3). As it turned out, the actual drafts of the speeches and their subsequent versions had been redacted from the material made available to the author, ‘leaving behind only official lists of what had been removed from Box 3’ (29). Despite this disappointing turn of events, Mapes makes the most of this experience. Of the 549 digital pages containing PDFs of scanned documents made available to her, she was able to tease out a small number of ‘skeletal’ documents, or Gennette’s (Reference Genette and Lewin1992) ‘paratexts’. Mapes elaborates brilliantly on these as evidence of the material processes of presidential speech production (text trajectories across various groupings of officials involved in possible text revisions), and entextualisation (laminations of different voices through deletions, additions, revisions, etc.). Mapes’ section titled ‘The life of a speech’ (79–104) is a brilliant case study of a bureaucratic pathway of a (redacted) speech draft based on nothing more than a couple of paratexts, such as the White House Staff memorandum coversheet (distribution list) accompanying the ‘main’ document.
After introducing her Goffman-inspired toolkit and other theoretical tributaries, Mapes uses the rest of chapter 2, ‘Parameters of professionalism: Invisibility, craft, virtue’, to flag the main themes of the book based on the three keywords of the chapter’s subtitle: invisibility, craft, and virtue. The remaining analyses demonstrate how the speechwriter discourse community claim and maintain their social and material capital. Each keyword is subsequently discussed in the following chapters: chapter 3, ‘Invisibility, materiality, and erasure’; chapter 4, ‘Craft, creativity, and distinction’; and chapter 5, ‘Virtue, transgression, and value’.
Despite her consistent use of the term wordsmith in recognition of speechwriters’ elite status and expert skillset, Mapes observed that her participants and informants do not particularly find it complimentary, as it ‘does not adequately capture the extent of their language work, nor their sense of ownership over the material they produce’ (19). Speechwriters’ work, argues Mapes, is invisibilised, and this dimension aspect of their work—their erasure from public view—is central to chapter 3 and permeates the rest of the book. To go back to Goffman’s terminology, speechwriters act as authors but typically not animators and virtually never principals (though see Hal’s comment cited below). This is not untypical across many other types of language workers (as well as intellectual non-language workers), and it constitutes a major theme in the informants’ accounts of their professional lives. Consequently, the topic of invisibility comes to the forefront of the book.
Discussion of invisibility and erasure in chapter 3 takes on a particularly interesting turn in relation to two case studies based on interviews with speechwriters (following the case study of Box 3, above). Evie provides an account of a typical cycle of writing a speech involving four stages: outline, draft, final [draft], and delivery; clearly, ‘draft’ includes not just one iteration of the text. Anna offers a glimpse of the mechanics of revisions of successive versions of a speech undergoing change due to two rhetorical strategies: simplification and/or intensification of words and phrases. Beyond these apparently ‘dry’ findings, Mapes demonstrates an incredibly dynamic, no doubt frequently stressful, though at times highly convivial relationship of speech writers with their principals and a whole range of other officials of different ranks. Overall, the image of speechwriters’ professional life that emerges from Mapes’ data suggests that—despite their claims of invisibility—they are often surrounded and appreciated by others, not least their principals and their principals’ audiences—actual or implied. Perhaps speechwriters’ self-ascribed erasure is just part of their enregistered gripe in the overall pursuit of recognition and status?
In chapter 3, Mapes mentions Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of ‘the artistic chronotope’ (92), sadly only in passing. I felt here that in this moment of positioning speechwriters as ‘artists’ creating texts that keep changing shape and move from place to place, the author gives them another layer of visibility, if only metaphorical or symbolic. Specifically, the book discusses the idea of speechwriters’ ‘giving’ or ‘enabling’ the principal’s voice. Perhaps this could be an opportunity to consider another Bakhtinian concept, ‘ventriloquism’, by suggesting that speechwriters act as ventriloquists remotely manipulating their ‘dummies’ (principals) in acts of performance?
Continuing the theme of speechwriters’ labour as artful, chapter 4 delves into the theme of ‘creativity’. The introductory discussion is necessarily multifaceted and complex involving not only creativity but also poetics and performance (Richard Bauman & Charles Briggs; Nikolas Coupland). Themes for problematising and unpacking creativity oscillate around such dichotomies as improvisation–innovation, vernacular–exceptional, process–product (Crispin Thurlow), mimicry–repetition (Joan Swann & Ana Deumert) vs. uniqueness–inventiveness (Ivar Liep), exceptional–vernacular/demotic (Deumert), big C creativity–small c creativity (Margaret Boden; Rodney Jones), and so on. What everyone seems to agree with (including speechwriters themselves), however, is that ‘true’ creativity, or big C creativity, or ‘high’ performance (N. Coupland) are better than vernacular creativity, or small c creativity, or ‘mundane’ performance. In the context of the neoliberal labour market, the ‘high’ conceptualizations of creativity allow ‘speechwriters [to] position themselves as craftspeople and, in turn, … [to] shore up their privilege vis-à-vis peers and other language workers’ (110; see also pp. 33, 116, 120).
Following on from that, much of chapter 4 is devoted to the demonstration of speechwriters’ metapragmatic manifestations of their drive for success and their apparent legitimacy to reap its symbolic and material rewards. For example, Hal maintains that because his own phrasing in a speech is capable of making a specific policy memorable to the audience, ‘he is therefore not only Goffman’s … author but also principle’ (118). By contrast, Bill claims that ‘the speechwriter’s job is not to just capture the principal’s voice, but also to ‘improve’ it’ (120). Thus, Mapes observes, not for the first time, that speechwriters ‘display a great sense of superiority, not least vis-à-vis their principals; by making claims of being able to invent the speaker’s voice, and therefore invent the speaker, they are able to shore up their relative power and status’ (120). Another theme that appears in chapter 4, to be developed fully in chapter 5, is that of speechwriters’ complementing of their stance of superiority with a streak of subversion, for example, manipulating their principals to the point of ‘tricking’ them to ‘buy into’ some controversial or otherwise dispreferred ideas (120). Furthermore, speechwriters’ claim to be in the business of producing texts that are poetic, persuasive, capable of stirring up intense emotions, invoking musicality, and, eventually, being rewarded with a check (extract 4.6; p. 125). Ultimately, ‘speechwriters strategically play with the real value of creativity in the contemporary, neoliberal market, thereby actively (re)producing its power as a linguistic-cum-political resource’ (132).
Chapter 5 concentrates on ‘virtue’ as integral to speechwriters’ conversational claims to prestige. Mapes demonstrates how speechwriters self-present as ‘virtual outlaws’, which they use as a slightly self-deprecating term but also ‘projecting moral certainty and epistemic authority’ (140). In fact, speechwriters’ subversive streak (mentioned above) manifests itself as a form of ingroup collusion (Comer) or intimate transgression (Justine Coupland & Adam Jaworski), which adds an affective and unifying dimension to the profession (147). In another part of chapter 5, ‘virtual outlaw’ is defined as ‘a rebel who simultaneously sticks to the principles of his craft’ (157), characterising speechwriters’ professional ethos combining servitude with transgression. For example, in a virtual ‘happy hour’ meeting among members of the Speechwriter Organization, participants discuss how, at times, speechwriters and their principals experience rifts resulting in the principal’s decision to overrule a particular phrase or passage. At this moment, one of the participants ventures the following: ‘but what you do is you save it for the next speech, or ten speeches later when they don’t remember you put it in there’ (152). Her utterance sums up nicely the three foundations of speechwriters’ claims of status: invisibility, craft, and virtue.
Chapter 6, ‘Reappraising language work: Status competition and elite precarity’, reflects on the state of the speechwriting professional group and discourse community in the context of contemporary labour markets. Rather than offering a clearcut set of ‘findings’ from her ethnography, Mapes leaves the reader with a set of somewhat paradoxical and ambivalent observations. She coins the term ‘elite precarity’ to compare the speechwriting community and their language practices with masses of underpaid, exploited, and marginalised workers struggling to survive (193). While the latter group appears to be diametrically different, or possibly not even comparable to the ‘relatively privileged professionals who are surely still beneficiaries of the [capitalist] system’ (193), global capitalism traps everyone in a cycle of boom and bust, perpetual job insecurity, and anxiety about one’s own self-worth blurred by one’s own market value (Bonnie Urciuoli; cf. Barakos Reference Barakos2021).
Mapes has delivered a compelling and innovative contribution to the sociolinguistics of language labour in liberal democracies of late capitalism, with a richly contextualised research context and convincing empirical analyses.
