Hypertexts are nonlinear largely because they are reader-centric. Navigation, and linking in general, expand the range of experiential avenues available to the reader who seems to actually become a user. According to Davida Charney, "The net effect of hypertext systems is to give readers much greater control over the information they read and the sequence in which they read it" (qtd. in Janangelo 30). While a table of contents, outline, or even subject headings enable the reader to enter the print text in his or her own way, the author's intention (or hope) is that the reader will enter the text at the start and work through to the conclusion. Not so with hypertext.

Hypertexts are fundamentally open, contain multiple points of entry, and generally require the user to construct the meaning of the hypertext by making navigational (authorial?) choices.

"Like the interlocutor in a Socratic dialogue, the electronic reader assumes at least partial control of the argument. . . . A hypertextual essay in the computer is always a dialogue between the writer and his or her readers, and the reader has to share the responsibility for hte outcome" (Bolter 117).

With hypertext, the user assumes authority over the reading of a text, and an effort by the author of a hypertext to deny the reader/user that authority undermines the suitability of a particular text for hypertext. This is why strictly linear essays make for very bad hypertext, and why the reader of such essays typically prints them before attempting to read them.

The reader-centric quality of hypertext, however, poses significant problems for any effort to build a hypertext with an argument (or multiple arguments) that is also more than an HTML essay or an extralinear essay.

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