In traditional prose, the author has total control over the presentation of text. The reader's control is limited to covert decisions such as whether or not to attend to the text, whether to skim over a dull section, or to read in a different sequence by flipping pages back and forth.

In on-line hypertext, the reader is free to navigate freely through the text, even jumping out to related texts, with only minimal authorial restrictions. In extreme hypertext creations, each reader may have a unique experience of the text based on the many individual decisions made at each selection point within the prose. In this type of environment, textual control is shared experience between both the author and the reader.