Text (literary theory)

Texts are like the stories your teacher reads to you in class or the books you see in the library. They are words and sentences that make up a story. But text is not just any story. It's the way the story is written and the way the words are put together that gives it meaning.

Think of building blocks. Each block is like a word, and you can use them to build different things. A text is like a tower that is built using different blocks. The blocks can be different words, punctuation marks, sentences or even paragraphs.

When you read a text, you have to look at all the parts to understand the whole story. It's like putting together a puzzle. You look at each piece carefully to see how it fits with the others.

In literary theory, people study texts to see what they can learn about the author's intentions, the story's themes or the historical context in which it was written. They may look closely at the language used, the structure of the story, and even the way it is printed on the page.

In simpler terms, text is just a bunch of words put together to tell us a story, but literary theory makes us look more closely at those words and how they fit together to help us learn more about the story and its context.