Given the dominant model of the comprehension process and the practical guidance commonly addressed to technical authors, it seems a brave stance to advocate an underlying model for hypertext which is anything other than hierarchical – at the document level at least. This approach has been adopted in very different ways by KMS and Guide, but their success remains open to evaluation.

Particularly in the case of the style of extended prose we have considered here, the author’s task would seem to be to simplify the argument in order that it can be more easily grasped. This simplifying process involves the imposition of structure on a set of facts, opinions or arguments. The author who fails to simplify and who merely presents a collection of randomly linked chunks of information will not be well-understood.