Glossary
signal word
A signal word is a transition that tells the reader what the next sentence is doing — adding, contrasting, concluding or giving a cause.
A signal word is a transition that announces the relationship between two sentences before the reader has parsed them: however warns of a turn, therefore of a conclusion, for example of an illustration, because of a cause. An author's structural pattern is built out of these markers, which makes them the fastest route into a text-structure question — find the transitions and the skeleton appears. They also carry meaning that a careless reader will invert. Although the protocol was followed, the sample degraded keeps the degradation as the main event; move the although and the emphasis lands on the protocol. There is a second use of the phrase in reading comprehension: a signal word in a passage can be a cue to the purpose of a sentence, and a signal word in a question (except, not, most likely) is a cue to read the question twice.
Taught in
Related terms
- text structure — Text structure is the outline a passage is built on — sequence, cause and effect, compare and contrast, or problem and solution — and naming it tells you where the claim sits.
- compare and contrast — A compare-and-contrast structure sets two things side by side, showing how they are alike and how they differ, usually along the same points.
- cause and effect — A cause-and-effect structure explains why something happened, linking an event to the conditions that produced it.
- sequence — A sequence structure presents information in time order, using words like first, then, after and finally as its skeleton.
Source: The reading-comprehension guide in this course: the three skills above are the ones that guide teaches, and every definition is written for this course in our own words, with no publisher's prose reproduced. Elsevier's own HESI A2 page, which names reading comprehension among the areas the exam covers, is the exam-side source. (Elsevier HESI A2 page accessed 2026-10-23; definitions written 2026-10-27)