Non Sequitur

I have never really understood what Ted Nelson meant, back at the beginning of things, when he called hypertext "non-sequential writing" (1987). In what sense can writing ever be non-sequential? If we stop reading from right to left? If we dispense with normal word order? But what does that prove? Consider the following example:

Even when scramble we of syntax English) sentence (especially re-imposes reader in re- linearity interpret in order to the the the.

Despite its heavy jumbling, the sentence above can still be understood with a certain amount of effort. Using familiar associational cues like subject-verb argreement ("we scramble"; "reader re-imposes") and likely phrase combinations ("even when"; "in order to"), a proficient reader should be able to piece out a translation. Even with rules of normal sequence suspended on one level, the sentence is still intelligible because it remains sequential on a finer scale -- that of individual words or tokens.

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