The life of a political speech(writer): Metadiscursive text trajectories in high-end language work

Abstract

Following Thurlow's (2020b) understanding of “wordsmiths,” in this paper I document an underexplored and markedly high-end area of language work: political speechwriting. Drawing on Macgilchrist and Van Hout's (2011) text trajectory approach to ethnographic discourse analysis I engage with two primary areas of scholarship: metadiscourse and entextualization (see Silverstein and Urban 1996), both of which facilitate a deeper understanding of the role of “elite” linguistic labor in contemporary markets. Ultimately, I demonstrate the ways in which political speechwriters come to claim skill and value – not only based on the unique “production format” (Goffman 1981) of the profession, but also related to the wider sociopolitical context of their work.