What Is a Text?

As readers and writers we create and consume a number of texts in a variety of contexts every day. What kind of text is the following? Does it sound familiar to you? Do you ever use or write this kind of text?

✓ loaf of bread
✓ container of milk
✓ stick of butter

It’s a shopping list, right? More specifically, it’s a grocery list. And for the little girl in this old Sesame Street video, it becomes a song.

How did you know the collection of words above is not simply a random list of words but rather a shopping list—a specific type of text? You probably realized right away that items in the list are all related. According to Rodney Jones in the book Discourse Analysis, what makes a set of words or sentences a text rather than “a random collection of linguistic items” is texture (5-6). He states, “the main thing that makes a text a text is relationships or connections” (7). Believe it or not there can be a number of different kinds of relationships in texts, even one as simple as our grocery list.

TRY THIS to understand the concept of a text. Review the following kinds of relationships in texts (Jones 7), and respond to the questions about each one for the shopping list example from above.

Cohesion. Relationships inside the text—between sentences or words, as well as other elements.

What do you notice about the words and phrases in the shopping list? What structural and design elements of the list do you notice?

Coherence. Relationships between the text and the person reading it—background knowledge and social situations.

What kind of background knowledge is needed to understand the text? Where might readers obtain such background knowledge? What social situations are associated with this text (consider the video, for example)?

Intertextuality. Relationships between the text and other texts in the world—to which others may need to refer for the text to make sense.

Is this list dependent upon any other kinds of texts for you to make sense of it? What about in the video?

In short, a text has texture: both an internal grammar or structure and expectations we bring to it as readers (Jones 7).

Furthermore, in addition to a text’s making sense, it also does something—it is used for something. The mother in the video gave the list (a spoken text) to the little girl, so that she would know what items to buy at the grocery store.

Texts even “promote certain points of view or versions of reality” (Jones 11). “They always represent the world in a certain way and create certain kinds of relationship with the people with whom we are communicating” (Jones 11). Texts promote what’s called an ideology which is, “a specific set of beliefs and assumptions about what is good and bad, what is right and wrong, and what is normal and abnormal. Ideologies provide us with models of how the world is ‘supposed to be’. In some respects ideologies help to create a shared worldview and sense of purpose among people in a particular group. Ideologies also limit the way we look at reality and tend to marginalise [sic] or exclude altogether people, things and ideas that do not fit into these models” (Jones 11).

Covino and Jolliffe further that the definition of a text can be understood as “any instance of spoken or written language” as a “momentary entry into an unending conversation” in connection with what other scholars call shifting “contexts of situation” (6). This means that while a text, like a grocery list, may seem self-contained when considered on its own in isolation, it’s actually always part of a longer conversation, a series of other texts.

TRY THIS to apply the concept of text. List as many texts you can think of that you have read today, or yesterday, or this week. Then, list as many texts you can think of that you have written recently. Categorize them by various types, cross-listing as needed. Bonus: Can you categorize them by discourse communities and genres (discussed in Chapter 2)?

It is important to remember that when you write you are creating and producing only a text—not the event itself, the experiment, or the exact contents of your mind, but rather a representation of any of these things. In the same way a photograph of a cow is not a cow, but only a representation of that animal, the same is true of a text that relies on words to represent anything. Author Annie Dillard provides a detailed and eloquent description of the process, the transformation, of an idea or vision into any work or text specifically. She discusses the end of this process:

The work is not the vision itself, certainly. It is not the vision filled in, as if it had been a coloring book. It is not the vision reproduced in time; that were impossible. It is rather a simulacrum and a replacement. It is a golem. You try—you try every time—to reproduce the vision, to let your light so shine before men. But you can only come along with your bushel and hide it. (41)

She adds that in creating the work—the text—you probably “have been forced to toss the most essential part of the vision” (41). Perhaps this sounds depressing, and for sure the process can be frustrating. However, when you remember that you’re producing a text to share with others in order to do something, achieve some purpose in the world, then you’ll realize, for example, that the feedback you receive along the way is to support your creation of the text, the representation of your vision and not your personal vision itself. Your vision may be to secure your dream job or argue for change, so you produce texts like resumes and letters so others may be inspired and take action. Dillard describes the moment you realize your text is just that, only a text—where you worked over your vision within various constraints and located innumerable possibilities:

But this is a concern for mere nostalgia now; for before your eyes, and stealing your heart, is this fighting and frail finished product, entirely opaque. You can see nothing through it. It is only itself, a series of well-known passages, some colored paint. Its relationship to the vision that impelled it is the relationship between any energy and any work, anything unchanging to anything temporal. (41)