One of the most interesting pieces from what might be considered the second generation of hypertext theorists is How to Wread Hypertext by Marcel O'Gorman, a Ph.D. student in Media Studies at the University of Florida. O'Gorman identifies three different categories of writing: the linear, the spatial, and the radial.
Linear reading is, of course, the traditional and most well recognized form of reading. It is the story that children tell with their continual additions of "and then". A linear text expects the reader to follow it from beginning to end, and it is constructed such that the reader will not get lost in the process.
Spatial reading is the process by which we garner information on the text not from the linear reading of the words on the page, but from an overall impression that we generate through scanning that page. O'Gorman writes:
A reader may gather information from a page of text simply by noting the length of its paragraphs, the use of endnotes, or the size and type of font. This type of reading usually occurs at an unconscious level, quickly and unavoidably as we leaf our way through a text. The reflex to prejudge the meaning of a page by its spatial presence is inescapable--and this prejudice affects the message transmitted by each and every page.O'Gorman adds:
Every text that we read transmits its meaning through both spatial and linear processes.Spatial reading doesn't oppose or contradict linear reading, but instead should compliment it. Hypertext, however, "interrupts both the linear and spatial modes of reading". Ultimately, according to O'Gorman, hypertext is not compatible with this sort of reading. Radial reading, however, is. The essence of radial reading is that
the reader's attention radiates away from the physical text with which s/he is primarily engaged.He quotes from Jerome McGann's essay How to Read a Book:
the elementary sign of radial reading is probably given by the figure of a person who rises from reading a book in order to look up the meaning of a word in a dictionary or to check some historical or geographical reference.and identifies a number of different sorts of radial reading, from the referential characterized going to the dictionary to look up the meaning of a word, to innertextual and intertextual reading in which at one sitting the reader moves between different passages in the same text or different texts, to the intertextual which
involves the interplay between the reader's text and his/her personal psychic repertoire.O'Gorman identifies this sort of reading as being highly compatible with hypertext.