Let me save your brain from the Doug Eyman scrambled special: “Text” is, at its core, any form of communication. Learning this in Intro to Writing saved me from burning out while making Eyman’s constitution of “text” in “Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice” (pp. 20-24) into something more digestible for myself. He, as per usual, wove together the words of others to achieve this. And, as good as he is at that, it resulted in yet another “indirect definition.” I think he actually had a good reason to use such a frustrating tactic of explanation this time, though. Near the end, he brought up that textual forms are still developing. This, in turn, expands “the notion of text beyond even the fairly broad definitions of discourse-in-material-form presented” in his book. So, if I understood correctly, he wanted to leave room for that expansion.
It feels counterintuitive, then, for him to spend five pages explaining a term that can be so neatly and clearly summed up while still leaving room for future growth. Even Eyman points out restrictions or issues that came with the theories he covered. For example, Robert de Beaugrande and Wolfgang Dressler’s (1981) criteria of textuality is “concerned only with rhetorically successful texts.” And Gunther Kress’s (2003) theory on text “encompasses a number of rhetorical elements but does not appear to include ‘audience’ as a design consideration except inasmuch as it is embedded within ‘the social and cultural environment.’”
It wasn’t until Eyman said “Texts have rhetorical features, originate in and propel social action, and are designed material objects” that I think I understood the point of his five-page info dump. He wanted the reader to not only know what text is, but also what causes its creation. He was proving that “these qualities provide the primary means of relationship between text and rhetoric-as-use.” There’s always a reason persuading us to communicate in one way or another. Think about it: What persuades us to say hello—communicate—to a familiar face in the morning? Socially, it’s the acceptable thing to do. Personally, it’s basic decency to acknowledge someone or there’s the motivation of creating a connection. So, I’ll give Eyman’s open-ended definition style a pass this time.
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