This manuscript provides a short and practical introduction to the topic of language networks. This text aims at assisting researchers with no practical experience in text and/or network analysis. We provide a practical tutorial on how to model and characterize texts using network-based features. In this tutorial, we also include examples of pre-processing and network representations. A brief description of the main tasks allying network science and text analysis is also provided. A further development of this text shall include a practical description of network classification via machine learning methods.