"I have found that writing in this form makes one resist closure. Every node is somehow questioned, extended, and deconstructed by some other node. The relentless drive toward a conclusion, even a tentative one, that print texts seem to demand is undercut by the demands of this new form of text. Whenever a series of nodes seemed to be working their way toward a final-ish sort of claim, I found myself deliberately looking for competing options, finding opposing viewpoints, or writing metatext that would question the text I was writing. ...The hypertext, I find, spawns a mindset that questions everything, sets everything in opposition to everything else. It spawns questions, resists answers."( Brent, "Further Discussion)
Landow makes similar comments on the frustrations of returning to print world after writing hypertexts. "Such frustrations," he says, "derive from repeated recognitions that effective argument requires closing off connections and abandoning lines of investigation that hypertextuality would have made available"(Landow, 80). He points out that he also created a hypertext version of the text, which had many more possible connections. The book form required that the argument be linear and that certain relevant (but not central) information be omitted to give the idea that the text is an ordered, unified whole.
It is important to note that there may be grave consequences (too extensive to be explored here) on the traditional rhetorical argument. It has been pointed out (by Brent and others) that Western conceptions of argument hinge on linearity. Without this constraint, argument as we know it might fall apart.
Landow continues, "...I realize that selection is one of the principles of effective argument. But why does one have to write texts in this way?"( Landow, 81-82) In fact, hypertexts do not place the same limits on a text that the printed book does.