Does this hypertext have an argument?

The essay attempts to develop an argument for the multilinear hypertext essay as perhaps the most significant emerging mode of hypertext research writing by enacting a version of a multilinear hypertext essay. The project here might simply go too far in its effort to disrupt linearity from the start, making it difficult to be certain that most users would recognize this point as a part of the core of the hypertext.

The use of Dynamic HTML for the navigation is a conscious effort to complicate the user's experience of the project. There are almost no visual or verbal cues helping the user locate a privileged or "true" entry point for the essay, and there is no meta-level linear discussion that might help the user approach the hypertext.

The hypertext identifies important problems with a nonlinear approach to a research essay, and points out the interesting (but still limited) developments around producing academic essays as hypertext.

There are discrete (linear?) points made throughout the individual pages. The essay draws on examples of linear, new media, extralinear, and multilinear hypertexts to illustrate these individual points. At a minimum, then, the essay categorizes approaches to the hypertext academic essay.

The hypertext attempts to address David Kolb's concerns that independent lexias pose a significant problem for argument in hypertext. The solution here is to embed the relations between lexias in this hypertext within an articulated context that provides a transition across links.

In addition, the hypertext begins to suggest why compositionists might be interested in moving toward teaching hypertext research writing. The shift from reader to user in hypertext may help students more easily become critically engaged readers. It may help them become more aware of the problem of audience in writing. It also opens the door for more multifaceted tools of persuasion and exposition through the new media essay.

What remains unclear is whether any of these issues come across to the user of the hypertext. Does this essay go further than Miles's "Hypertext Syntagmas" in building an accessible argument that works across individual nodes and layers, while still being discernible with a less than complete reading?

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