ABSTRACT
The concepts of occasion, audience, and purpose represent learning thresholds that require students to cross into new intellectual territory. Most teenagers don’t start off thinking about the elements of a rhetorical situation as a box of spare parts they must assemble in a do-or-die endeavor. Students who recognize the kind of moves writers make through their language choices not only have an easier time understanding the arguments of other writers but also have an easier time making their own readers understand them. Students mark liminal moments within a text, the turning from one idea to the next. Signal words like those above likewise point to transitional moments in the social world outside a text.
