I've got lots of experience at that.
Well before I become familiar with hypertext, my chosen form of written expression
was the run-on sentence. Structurally these were definitely identifiable as sentences
- at least they started with a capitalized letter and ended with a period and
had a central noun that either verbed or was verbed to. But between that identifiable
start and finish, even with noun and verb almost directing the traffic, keeping
the flow, my words always seemed to meander around just about everything I could
think of, with only the help of something resembling a leap of faith finally bringing
me (usually trying to catch my breath as though I'd been sprinting) to that almost
orphaned period. Admittedly, these sentences weren't fully grammatically correct,
but they served their purpose for me, and if anybody was reading, I liked to think
that if he or she got to the end of them they did so with at least a kernel of
understanding. Was it my fault that one idea was always leading to another, and
that the only solution available to me (that I was aware of) was packing everything,
portmanteau style, into that one sentence? It
shouldn't come as a surprise that for me, what hypertext offered was less a means
of jumping from thought to thought, and instead simply an elegant means of cleaning
up my act.
Go to: The (ir)relevance of hypertext