What is a Text?

Before I stumbled into a software career, I got an English degree. A lot of people think that this means that I spent college reading a lot and writing a lot, and I did do that, but I also spent my undergraduate years contemplating a handful of repeated questions across almost all of my classes. The most important of these questions was, "What is a Text?"People who haven't studied this question carefully tend to have a model that's something like this:There is a Meaning and it lives in the head of the Author.The Author writes a Text to express the Meaning.Now there is a Text and it contains the Meaning.Later, a Reader reads the Text, and extracts the Meaning.A lot of high school English is taught this way. Reading is taught as a process of decoding. Being a "better" reader means being able to decode more complex texts with more complex meanings. There's a lot of emphasis on symbols, and on the idea that there are secret meanings in texts that a clever reader can extract.While this…