4 ms·
Split your infinitives if you want, and feel free to end your sentences with a preposition. Both of those "rules" are artificial.
by not2b 5y ago
Split your infinitives if you want, and feel free to end your sentences with a preposition. Both of those "rules" are artificial.
- smitty1e 5y agoI'd say "be deliberate". Understand the language well enough to know when crossing a line. My pet quibble is the "Cornell nominative"[1], when "The boss invited me to lunch" and "The boss invited Tom to lunch" becomes "The boss invited Tom and I" to lunch. The common usage shifts me => I when going from singular to plural for no reason whatsoever. [1] https://www.chronicle.com/article/say-it-aint-so-46137/ https://www.chronicle.com/article/say-it-aint-so-46137/
- ncmncm 5y agoThere is simply no such line. Split any infinitive you like. End any sentence with a preposition, or more if you like. Spit on anybody who tries to shame you for it. I stopped trying to read Paolo Bacigalupi because his extreme efforts to follow these dumb nonexistent rules were so annoying. The Cornell nominative is arguably worse than those others because you won't even find anything published insisting it is a good idea.
- radford-neal 5y agoIndeed. Authors who carefully avoid splitting infinitives frequently produce stilted, and often ambiguous, sentences, many of which no one would ever produce in real speech (i.e., that are ungrammatical). "He decided to quickly rewrite the story" is not improved by changing it to "He decided quickly to rewrite the story" (says the wrong thing), or "He decided to rewrite quickly the story" (ungrammatical), or "He decided to rewrite the story quickly" (ambiguous). Reading such authors is painful, as every stilted sentence distracts one from whatever the author was trying to say.