He divides the effects of texts into two: plaisir ('pleasure') and jouissance, translated as 'bliss' but the French word also carries the meaning of 'orgasm'.

The different codes (hermeneutic, action, symbolic, semic, and historical) that Barthes defines in S/Z inform and reinforce one another, making for an open text that is indeterminant precisely because it can always be written anew.

The British sociologist of education Stephen Ball has argued that the National Curriculum in England and Wales is a writerly text, by which he means that schools, teachers and pupils have a certain amount of scope to reinterpret and develop it.

[1] In Ascott's work, the text itself is the result of a collaborative reading/writing process among participants around the world, connected via computer networking (telematics).

Moreover, the mechanism of distributed authorship enabled Ascott's "planetary fairytale" to self-pleat in a way that, like a surrealist exquisite corpse, could not have been the product of a single mind.