The Chronicle of Higher Education

Infinitives Can Be Split: Grammar Conservatives Face the Shock

For those who boldly violate the Prime Directive by trying to enrich the general public’s understanding of English grammar and thus change the planetary culture, each tiny triumph is something to ...
Univeristy of Iowa Daily Iowan

Elliot: Don’t sweat the split infinitive

“ho doesn’t love some free Panchero’s?” is what we read recently on the UI Main Calendar of Events. Obviously, a job for Dr. Life Grammar. Dear Dr. Life Grammar: Try as I might, I can’t seem to get ...
San Diego Union-Tribune

Is it acceptable to occasionally split an infinitive?

Now that you have freed prepositions to bravely be sentence endings, you might clarify Miss Thistlebottom’s split infinitive rule. — Pam Rider, East Village, San Diego Joining the preposition rule in ...
Los Angeles Times

A Word, Please: It’s not possible to badly split an infinitive

Not long ago while editing a series of articles, I noticed that the writer had strange ideas about where to put adverbs. Many were placed before the verbs and some before the subjects, too. “He ...
San Diego Union-Tribune

It’s OK to boldly go and purposely split an infinitive

DEAR RICHARD: Now retired from 50 years of college teaching and having no more student papers to grade and critique, I address your recent U-T column. I so enjoy, appreciate, and support your language ...
Los Angeles Times

A Word, Please: Split infinitives: the mistaken rule with a catchy name

Reader Don in Los Angeles County wrote recently with a question about a well-known grammar issue called a “split infinitive.” “I learned about them 50 years ago and I am somewhat sensitive about them ...
The Economist

The ban on split infinitives is an idea whose time never came

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW was once so angry with a subeditor that he complained to the newspaper. “I ask you, sir,” Shaw wrote, “to put this man out.” The cause of his fury? The editor had insisted on ...
The New Yorker

Syntactical Fission: Splitting the Infinitive

Today we're gonna talk about split infinitives. First of all, what is an infinitive? It's a form of the verb that has to in front of it. And it doesn't indicate anything about tense or about person or ...
Law

Split Infinitives Aren't Wrong But They Are Risky

A reader asked me whether splitting infinitives is grammatically correct. Most modern authorities say it is, but I recommend that you don’t spilt infinitives because it may irritate judges who were ...
The New York Times

INFINITIVES THAT SPLIT.

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...
The Economist

Johnson: Talking past each other

SOME advice is worse than useless. A short list of bullet points from eHow, a website, that is passing around social networks purports to show “how to write good.” (Each rule was jokingly broken in ...