Split Infinitives: Should they be allowed in formal, academic text?
How important is learning basic grammar to becoming a good writer?
Can than be used as a preposition as well as a conjunction, as in "He's taller than me"?
Should ain't be revived as a way out of the difficulties we have with third-person subject-verb agreement?
Prepositions at the end of sentences?
Should instructors (in disciplines other than English) "take off" for bad grammar?
Should "their" be accepted as a singular, genderless substitute for "his/her," even in academic text?
It should be regarded as acceptable to begin a sentence with "hopefully," as in "Hopefully, the troops will arrive by tomorrow morning."
It is high time we consigned the notion that we can't begin a sentence with the word because to the schoolroom trashbasket.
We should be able to use the verb can when we ask permission, as in "Mrs. Thompson, can I go to the bathroom?"
Even in textbooks and formal text, we should be allowed to use data and media as singular words (as in "The data is lost" and "The media is out to get him").
The plural form for that hand-held contraption we use in navigating our computer windows — should it be mice or mouses?
It should be acceptable to use whose to refer to inanimate objects (as in "The library, whose design was approved by the School of Architecture, is one of the ugliest buildings on campus").
It's time to consign "shall" to the wastebasket — mostly because no one knows how to use it properly and partly because it's too "stuffy" when it is used properly. In other words, "I shall end with a poem by Robert Frost" will be replaced by "I will end with a poem by Robert Frost."
It should be regarded as acceptable to begin a sentence with "and" or "but."
We should spell "cannot" as two separate words, always, just like any other negative construction.
It should be regarded as acceptable (at all levels) to say and write "I am done" (instead of having to say or write "I am finished").
In the United States, we should have an officially sanctioned body of some kind (academically oriented, perhaps?), like France's Académie Française, to oversee the purity of the English language and to stem its corruption by slang and bad usage.