OED (2022)

The wording of anything written or printed; the structure formed by the words in their order; the very words, phrases, and sentences as written.

Etymology: < French texte, also Old Northern French tixte, tiste (12th cent. in Godefroy), the Scriptures, etc., < medieval Latin textus the Gospel, written character (Du Cange), Latin textus (u-stem) style, tissue of a literary work (Quintilian), lit. that which is woven, web, texture, < text-, participial stem of texĕre to weave.

For me, our work starts with this concept. College composing, and most of what I do in a day, involves making and taking meanings from things people make–what I call artifacts–that make sense within this or that context. The OED feels pretty insufficient to me. Texts are often written in sentences but many, maybe most are now images and a lot are video. I will use the word text to mean artifacts that represent complete meanings in contexts. I could write for a long time about what a text is. You work with them all the time, text messages, conversations with baristas at Starbucks, emails requesting extensions on deadlines, Instagram posts, YouTube videos with captions and subtitles and replies. Representations of meaning that circulate in contexts. If we belong in the context even a little, we recognize them, know when they are complete and know when they can’t mean because they are incomplete. If we learn a few conventions and are prepared to participate in the context, we can come to recognize them, make sense of them, and make them.

Everything we do in college composition will involve playing with texts, things that make meanings in some context. You don’t need to be as interested in texts as I am. You will need to get interested enough to pass as someone who is learning to move texts around in college.

Want more? Chase the phrase down in a couple good dictionaries and look at the etymology, the history of the word.

Resources

HtWA. This guide seems, at least to me, to take this concept for granted. Hmmm.

OWL. Ditto. The OWL doesn’t take time to unpack this keyword. Sigh.