answer:Assuming that you only want to highlight or blind down (or any other effect that you desire) only the content you’ve inserted and not the whole ‘activity’ object, then I think you’ll be faced with 2 different answers depending on what you want to do. In the case of Highlight, I don’t think it’s requisite that you have a block element (I could be wrong, however) so what I would do is wrap your response text within a span tag, perhaps with a randomly generated id, and call Effect.Highlight after the insert: $(‘activity’).insert({ top: ’<span id[equal]“newText”>’+transport.responseText+’</span>’ }); new Effect.Highlight(‘newText’); If you want to do a blind down, slide down, etc. you’re going to need to place your new text within a block element (I’d use a div). The downside to this approach is that if the new content you’re loading into the page isn’t an entirely new paragraph, it’s not going to look too pretty: $(‘activity’).insert({ top: ’<div id[equal]“newText” style[equal]“display:none;”>’+transport.responseText+’</div>’ }); new Effect.BlindDown(‘newText’); Hope that helped!