Fact vs. fiction in professional speechwriting

Abstract Building on work related to the commodification of linguistic skill in late capitalism (e.g. Cameron 2000), in this forum article I comment on the ways in which cinematic portrayals of speechwriters can be seen to simultaneously (dis)align with the reality of their working lives. By comparing two representative examples—one from my ethnographic research in the US American speechwriting community, and one from the 2019 film Long Shot—I demonstrate how the primary rhetorical strategies that come through in real-life speechwriters’ discourse (invisibility, craft, and virtue) are also powerfully present in this fictionalized representation. Thus, I argue that idealized portrayals of speechwriters on-screen help to construct the legitimacy and value of contemporary practitioners in the (linguistic) marketplace.