Virtuous Outlaws: Affective Claims to Value in Professional Speechwriters’ Discourse

Abstract

In this paper I investigate the unique ‘production format’ (Goffman 1981) of professional speechwriting; while the behind-the-scenes nature of this high-end language work (Thurlow 2020a) demands a marked erasure of authorship (see Mapes 2023, in press), this can simultaneously be used as a resource for claiming professional virtue and ingroup status. To demonstrate the largely reflexive (e.g. Giddens 1991) and affective (e.g. Weatherell 2013) underpinnings of this sort of discursive negotiation, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork in the US American speechwriting community, including a 3-day professional speechwriting course; ‘language biography’ interviews (cf. Preston 2004); and a video-recorded virtual meeting. Following important scholarship in professional/workplace discourse, these data not only document the interesting ways in which speechwriters exercise their agency (e.g. White 2018), but also complicated entanglements with the ‘semiotic ideologies’ (Keane 2018) of contemporary life. Ultimately, certain kinds of words and work have value in the (linguistic) marketplace—and according to speechwriters, theirs certainly do.