Hypertext and Reading Cognition
Alec McHoul and Phil Roe
School of Humanities, Murdoch University
Summary
Hypertext provides links for the reader to click on to access related information required. Hence there are free choices for the reader. Texts can be differentiated into two categories, 'readerly' and 'writerly'. Both types of texts always depend on what they oppose, play the games and find ways of operating within the same rules. Ideally, authors and readers should have the same set of tools that enable them to browse through other materials during the document preparation process and add annotations and original links as they progress through an information web. However, in real life, links and nodes are actually constructed by the author, not the readers. Hypermedia is present to affect the way readers look and decipher meanings from the hypertext. Hypertext scanning is similar to the readers' using of an encyclopedia to search for information. Readers only go to indexes which are relevant instead of reading the hypertext from beginning to end. Reading remains a complex activity with no defining characteristics that hypertext can differ from.
