In this treatment a text is considered to be a series of word impulses which are read at a constant rate. The brain then assembles these units of information into higher units of meaning. A classical systems approach is used to model an initial part of this assembly process. The concepts of linguistic system response, information energy, and ordering energy are defined and analyzed. Finally, as a demonstration, information energy is used to estimate the publication dates of a series of texts and the similarity of a set of texts.