Problem
• This chapter argues that meaning is not "built into" texts, but that instead a reader makes meaning by bringing together what a text says and a number of other elements. What are those other elements? Can you suggest examples from your own experience that show this argument is accurate? Do other examples from your experience suggest it's not?
• What do the writers mean when they say "texts are people talking"?
• What do you know about the writers of this textbook? How is it a motivated text?
• Try rhetorically reading a text that you might usually only read for information - like a chapter from one of your science textbooks, or a Wikipedia article, or even the nutrition information on a cereal box. How is the text motivated? What exigence brings it into existence to begin with? How do you hear the writer talking to you? How does the context in which it was written shape it, and how does the context you're reading it in shape your construction of its meaning? How do your needs, values, and expectations of the text as a reader shape the meaning you make of it, and your reaction to it?