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.

中文翻译：

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政治演讲（作家）的一生：高端语言作品中的元话语文本轨迹

遵循瑟洛（2020b）对“语言工匠”的理解，在本文中，我记录了一个尚未充分探索且明显高端的语言工作领域：政治演讲写作。借鉴Macgilchrist和Van Hout（2011）的民族志话语分析的文本轨迹方法，我研究了两个主要的学术领域：元话语和文本化（参见Silverstein和Urban 1996），这两个领域都有助于更深入地理解“精英”的作用当代市场中的语言劳动。最终，我展示了政治演讲撰稿人主张技能和价值的方式——不仅基于该行业独特的“生产格式”（Goffman 1981），而且还与他们工作的更广泛的社会政治背景相关。