First, a conventional "straight" essay was written. For this, ideas were presented in a logical manner as would normally be done in an essay. The straight essay consisted of 96 sentences plus 3 e-mail messages that were included as block quotes within the text.

After the straight essay was completed, a 2-digit number was assigned to each of the 96 sentences. To generate a number, a 10-sided die (with faces labeled 0 through 9) was rolled twice. The first roll was for the most-significant digit; the second was for the least-significant digit. In some cases, the same number was assigned to more than one sentence. For such sentences, the 10-sided die was rolled one more time. The resulting digit was appended as a decimal digit after the sentence's 2-digit number. Additional decimal digits were generated and appended as needed until a unique number was assigned to each sentence.

The foreground text of the essay consists of the 96 sentences arranged in numerical order. The paragraph structure (i.e. the number of paragraphs and the number of sentences per paragraph) of the straight essay was used to set paragraph breaks in the foreground text. Conceptually, one could say that the foreground text was determined by "pouring" a randomly arranged sequence of the 96 sentences back into the form of the essay from which the sentences were derived. For example, the first paragraph of the straight essay contained four sentences. So, the first paragraph of the foreground consists of the first four numbered sentences, in order. Similarly, subsequent paragraphs of the foreground were constructed in this way.

In addition, any special formatting of paragraphs in the straight essay was taken to be part of its form and applied to the foreground text. Specifically, the second paragraph of the straight essay was a block quote; indented and set in a small font. The last paragraph consisted of two sentences that were centered and set in a small font, with a line break after the first sentence. Likewise, the same numbered paragraphs of the foreground text have these characteristics.

Finally, parentheses, brackets and ellipses were taken to be part of the form of the straight essay rather than part of the sentences with which they were associated. These elements were placed in the foreground text at the same position at which they occurred in the straight essay. Specifically, the fifth and sixth sentences of the fourth paragraph of the foreground text are enclosed in square brackets. The second sentence of the fifth paragraph is enclosed in parentheses. The corresponding sentences in the straight essay were enclosed in the same way. (Note: Parentheses contained within a sentence, like those in the last sentence of the second paragraph of the foreground text, were taken to be part of the sentence rather than part of the form of the straight essay.) Regarding the ellipses in the second paragraph of the foreground text, their positions (relative to the ten sentences contained therein) and their lengths (3 dots or 6 dots) match those of ellipses in the second paragraph of the straight essay.

The three e-mail messages in the straight essay were used in chronological order for the background text. These were colored gray, rotated counterclockwise 90 degrees, and placed along the left edge of the essay, behind the foreground text.

The following factors were among those considered in determining the vertical position of the e-mail messages relative to the foreground text: geometric relationships (e.g. the golden ratio) in the arrangement of rectangles that circumscribe foreground paragraphs and e-mail messages, poetic relationships between words and sentences of the e-mail messages and adjacent words and sentences of the foreground text, and the legibility of the e-mail messages (which were to be partially obscured by the foreground text).

The text of the essay is displayed using a GIF file in order to guarantee that the relative position of the foreground and background text would be the same regardless of the mechanism (browser, printer or other) employed to view it. This could not be guaranteed if the text were formatted with HTML in the normal way. One potential disadvantage of this approach is that, at this time, search engines do not scan GIF files for text when indexing a web page. To circumvent this, the text in the GIF image was included as raw text in the HTML file that displays the image. The line height of the raw text was set to one pixel. This text, which has the appearance of a graphic design, was placed near the bottom of the essay.