What is a Text? 0 ▲ Simpler Machines 50 days ago · Tech · hide · Fediverse post 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… Commenting on Bubbles has been removed. Why? If you want to talk about this post, write to the author, use the comments on their blog if it has them, or reply with a "RE:" post on your own blog. Suggestions? feedback@bubbles.town
