The Cultural Politics of Digital User Experience Writing

By: Lara Portmann

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Synopsis: User experience (UX) writers are the professionals who create the verbal content of websites, apps, or other software interfaces, including error messages, help texts, software instructions, or button labels that we all see and engage with every day. This invisible yet highly influential language work has been largely ignored by sociocultural linguists. The book addresses this gap, examining the broader cultural politics of digital media through an exploration of the linguistic production and purposeful design of interface texts. It discusses UX writing as an influential contemporary domain of language work and shows how the specific practices and processes that structure this work shape the norms that become embedded in software interfaces. It highlights the nature of UX writing, its (meta)pragmatic organization, and its cultural-political implications. Foregrounding the voices and perspectives of language workers, it is essential reading for anyone interested in how language shapes the way people use digital media.