["Symbolic Interaction, Volume 44, Issue 4, Page 819-842, November 2021. ", "\nI consider a particularly puzzling conversational phenomenon: the repetition acknowledgment preface, or RAP, which consists of a brief reference to an earlier telling of a story, or topic of conversation, prior to its repetition (e.g., I was just telling John…). Drawing on the work of Erving Goffman, in particular, and a collection of carefully documented empirical episodes, I identify eleven functions RAPs may serve (intentionally or unintentionally), the circumstantial preconditions for each, and the extent to which RAPs are well‐suited for it, conjecturing that well‐suitedness is a clue to RAPs' original purpose.\n"]