A guide for students
Every page of this textbook has a margin you can write in. You can ask a question about a sentence you didn’t follow, point out a typo, or argue with a claim — and it stays attached to the exact words you were reading.
This page explains how to read what’s already in the margins, how to add your own, and two things about it that surprise people. It takes five minutes.
Reading the comments — nothing needed
Anyone can read the margin comments. No account, no sign-up, no login.
Under the title of every chapter there’s a row of small links, and at the end of it a badge. It says “3 annotations” if there are three, or “Annotate this page” if there are none yet.
Click the badge. A sidebar opens along the right-hand edge of the page, listing every comment on that chapter. Click one and the passage it belongs to lights up in the text, so you can see what the person was actually talking about.
You can also just start reading and watch for highlighted passages — those are places someone has already said something.
Close the sidebar with the same badge, or the arrow at its top corner.
Leaving your own comment
For this you need a free account with Hypothes.is, the service that runs the margin. It takes about a minute.
- Go to https://hypothes.is and sign up. It’s free and it asks for an email address and a username — nothing else.
- Come back to the textbook and open the sidebar (the badge under the chapter title).
- Log in at the top of the sidebar.
Pick your username with a little care: it appears next to every comment you leave, and anyone can see it. Plenty of people use something that isn’t their full name. That’s fine.
Then, to comment:
- Select the text you want to comment on — drag across a sentence, a phrase, a whole paragraph, whatever the comment is about.
- A small Annotate button appears next to what you selected. Click it.
- The sidebar opens with an empty comment box, already attached to your selection. Type, then click Post.
That’s it. Your comment is now in the margin of that chapter, anchored to those exact words, and it stays there.
You can edit or delete anything you’ve posted — the ⋮ menu at the top-right of your own comment. You can’t edit or delete anyone else’s, and they can’t touch yours.
Replying works the same way: open the sidebar, find a comment, click Reply. Most of the good conversations on the page are replies rather than new comments.
Two things people don’t expect
Your comments are public
They are not private to your class, and they are not visible only to your tutor. A comment you post here can be read by anyone on the internet, whether or not they have an account — the same way you can read everyone else’s without one.
The textbook does not run separate comment spaces for separate classes. That was considered and decided against, so it isn’t coming later either. There is one margin, and everybody shares it.
None of that is a reason not to comment. It just means: write what you’d be happy to have your name on. If you want to say something you’d rather keep between you and your tutor, use whatever your course normally uses for that — email, the course forum — not the margin.
Don't put personal information in a comment
Not your student number, not your email address, not anything about your health, your marks, or anyone else. Once it’s posted it’s on the open web.
Last year’s comments are already there
The margin isn’t wiped between cohorts. Open a chapter and you may find comments from students who took the course a year or two ago, sitting alongside this year’s.
This is deliberate — a good question from two years ago is still a good question, and the answers under it are worth reading. But it does mean the sidebar isn’t a picture of what your class is currently discussing, and a comment with no reply may simply be old rather than ignored.
Each comment shows the date it was posted, under the username. Check it if you’re unsure whether a conversation is live.
Tags (optional, and often skipped)
Comments here come in roughly two kinds, and there are two words for them:
copy-edit— you’ve spotted a mistake. A typo, a broken link, a wrong number, a sentence that doesn’t parse.discussion— a question, a disagreement, an idea. Nothing is broken; you want to talk about it.
Adding one of these words as a tag helps whoever is looking after the book sort corrections from conversation. It’s genuinely useful, and it’s also genuinely optional.
While the sidebar is open, a small panel appears just to its left, with both words on it as buttons. Here’s what it actually does, because it looks like it should do more:
Clicking one copies that word to your clipboard. That’s all. You then paste it into the Tags field underneath your comment before you post.
It can’t fill the field in for you. The comment box lives inside a frame the textbook’s own page isn’t allowed to write into — a browser security rule, not an oversight — so copy-and-paste is as close as it can get.
So: most comments have no tag at all, and that’s completely fine. An untagged comment is read the same as a tagged one. If you’re reporting an obvious typo, the tag saves someone a moment; otherwise, don’t think about it.
If something doesn’t work
No badge under the chapter title. The page couldn’t reach Hypothes.is. Usually a browser extension — an ad-blocker or a privacy blocker — or a network that blocks it. Try a different browser, or your phone off wi-fi.
The badge says “annotation tools blocked”. Same cause, and now the page is telling you outright. Same fixes.
You selected text and no Annotate button appeared. Try selecting a bit more — a very short selection can miss. Selections that cross an image or a table sometimes don’t take either.
Your comment vanished after the chapter was edited. It hasn’t been deleted. When the wording a comment was attached to changes a lot, the comment can’t find its place any more, so it moves to an Orphans tab at the top of the sidebar. It’s still there, still yours, still readable.
The comment is on the wrong sentence. Occasionally an edit shifts a highlight onto a similar phrase elsewhere on the page. Annoying, harmless, nothing you did.
If none of that helps, tell your course coordinator rather than trying to fix it — it’s almost always something at the site’s end.
The short version
- Reading comments: click the badge under the chapter title. No account.
- Writing them: free Hypothes.is account, select text, click Annotate, type, Post.
- Everything you post is public and shows your username.
- Old comments from previous years stay on the page. That’s normal.
- Tags are nice, optional, and copy-paste only.
Course coordinators: briefing notes for students, and the reasoning behind the single shared public margin, are in the department edition template’s guide.