Students generally agreed that hypertext gave more power to the reader, whether it were simply the structural permission, via the apparently non-hierarchical web of links, to skip from text block to text block until the reader found one s/he could understand, or enjoy, or the liberation, as V. saw it, of learning to exist happily as a reader in a state of controlled chaos. "My understanding did not come from carefully fitting the words together, but leaving them in a chaotic state." Or as D claimed, "In reading hypertext you have no clue what's coming next and that's what makes it fun."

Reading the 'little mosaic-like stories" was such an alien experience that the majority of the students surrendered to the experience of reading, to chaos, in the first week of the Patchwork Girl encounter simply because they had no option. Yet that very struggle encouraged the majority of students to analyze more self-consciously the reader's relationship with the author and the author's text. Instead of being the victims of the text, pinioned by long words and puzzling forms, they entered an ongoing, more patient, partnership with it.

Despite agreement on gaining power in that partnership, however, most decided quickly that readerly freedom, intoxicating as it seemed, represented something of an authorial concession.