If you ask me … the problem with opening gambits

Many moons ago, I enjoyed a brief and intense love affair with a book by Eric Keller and Sylvia Warner called Conversation Gambits. First published by LTP back in 1988, I came to it in the mid-1990s and at the time it was something of a revelation, containing as it did a whole host of relatively fixed sentence starters that served particular pragmatic functions in everyday conversation. This was an area of language things like The Lexical Approach and various books on Discourse Analysis had made me aware of, but that I’d never before seen presented in a way that made classroom exploration fun and easy.

If you ask me … the problem with opening gambits.