Indeed. Authors who carefully avoid splitting infinitives frequently produce stilted, and often ambiguous, sentences, many of which no one would ever produce i

Indeed. 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.