An important element of hypertext involves the possibility for multiple relationships between elements of a particular hypertext, and between elements of different texts joined by way of the hyperlink. These relationships are reader-centric. The text of a hypertext actually gets constructed as a reader selects which relationship(s) to explore by clicking the links from one chunk of a hypertext to another. Early on, George Landow recognized the impact this feature of hypertext might have on the possibility for argument.

"The text appears to fragment, to atomize, into constituent elements (into lexias or blocks of text); and these reading units take on a life of their own as they become more self-contained, because they become less dependent on what comes before or after in a linear succession. When compared to text as it exists in print technology, forms of hypertext evince varying combinations of atomization and dispersal" (Landow 64).

Borrowing an element from the print essay, the paragraph is a discrete unit within a larger written work. It is linked to its preceding and succeeding paragraphs, and to the argument of the entire essay through topic sentences and transitions, in addition to the overarching linearity of the print essay. This structure, in effect, carries the reader through the essay. The introduction announces the purpose of the essay, and individual paragraphs help develop and support that project.

With hypertext, one retains a unit analogous to the paragraph—the lexia, chunk, or block of text on a web page. What the reader may lose in a hypertext essay are the structural cues that signal the author's sense of the path through the essay—what David Kolb calls "the line" (326). The author's choice of links to include in any particular lexia signals possible paths and relationships, to be sure. But the multiplicity of paths within a hypertext may come across to the reader as a series of discrete "reading units" rather than a larger work that encompasses those units.

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