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Hypertext can bring much to the teaching of writing. Specifically, it combines the product and process approaches to writing. What can be taught about writing, by teachers and textbooks, is what cannot be learned from reading written products. What can and must be taught is the process by which those products were produced. Because hypertext is nonlinear or multidimensional, because it can allow scrolling forward or backward in time, it can allow student writers to see "behind" finished documents to the processes that produced them. Hypertext thus has the potential--not achievable by normal, linear textbooks--to truly relate process and product. Hypertext can give students flexible, individualized access to various stages in the writing of various documents. Hypertext allows people to create textbooks that do well the only thing that writing instruction can do at all. (Twelve references are attached.) (MS)

Writing teachers have a potential role in the development of a better hypertext. Hypertext can be defined as writing designed to be read--and perhaps added to--along many different paths, at the reader's choice. What the computer does for hypertext is increase greatly the speed and potential number of the links between chapters or ideas. What writing specialists can do to help in the creation of hypertexts is (1) become familiar with the medium, since hypertext is a future of written communication; (2) insist on even greater sophistication and ease of use for hypertext; and (3) bring the knowledge of writing instruction to the solution of the problems inherent in hypertext. Discussions that are going on now about hypertext include research exploring readability variables, the"node size" (the quantity of information that makes up the basic unit of a hypertext document), and the debate about the links that lead from one hypertext to another. Discussions are also in progress among hypertext developers about the extent and nature of reader participation in the hypertext writing process. The founders of the hypertext concept have insisted that hypertext should remove the distinction between writer and reader, and so they have designed hypertext systems that permit the reader to annotate or even alter the hypertext document, while still preserving the integrity of the earlier writer's work. Writing specialists can help find the answers to what kind of reader activity should be provided for. (MS)