so

So is probably the most important discourse marker on our list since it's basically used to let people know that you're about to tell a story. But it has other uses within the story, as we'll see here. We're most familiar with so used as a conjunction. We normaly use it when there's a cause and effect: because of [xxx], therefore [xxx]. For example, I was getting drowsy, so I drank a cup of coffee. Here we see that there was a cause — the speaker was getting drowsy, and an effect — they drank a cup of coffee.

But like so many English words, so wears lots of hats, and one of them is that of a discourse marker. In that role, it doesn't express an effect. In fact, it's the first word in our first blogpost, so clearly there's no "cause" in front of it. As a discourse marker, it simply says Hey, I'm about to tell you something, so listen up... and this can be a story, your version of something that happened, an explanation of something in your own words, an answer to a question that requires a longish answer, etc. As such, it has no real, translatable meaning — it's merely a marker, a kind of warning that you're about to talk about something and you're not going to be brief.