Research suggests that screen displays can create reading problems, which can greatly affect rhetorical issues surrounding the design of online documents. Hypertext supports nonlinear reading while print documents are designed to be read linearly.
Readers can still jump around print documents, and even skip sections or chapters.
Nonetheless, there is still one unique, predetermined sequence of pages to be read. With hypertext, readers choose which sequence of topics to follow. In essence, they create their own version of the text. Some argue that due to its nonlinear structure, hypertext reconfigures the roles of text, reader, and writer. Information in each medium is conveyed differently to its readers.