Split Infinitive?

Question

I am proofing a piece of high school scientific text and have the following sentence:

"Consider a learner sitting at her desk in a classroom at school. We would consider her not to be moving at all."

That last piece, 'not to be moving at all' bugs me. Wouldn't it sound better to write, "We would consider her to not be moving at all"? It is aimed at lower grades in third world countries, so would like to avoid phrasing like, "We would consider her to be stationary".

Any suggestions?

Mister Micawber · Accepted Answer

The short answer: it's not important. But how about an even more natural way: We would not consider her to be moving at all.

Split infinitives are a hoary old target of outrage, but they are and have been completely innocent of any crime for centuries. I can give you plenty to think about. You can read more [url=http://www.testmagic.com/grammar/explanations/verbs/split-infinitives.asp]HERE[/url]. I can also give you this piece I've saved:

Certain grammatical "rules" that are widely viewed as correct come from the invalid application of grammatical rules from Classical Latin and Greek to the English language by British authors writing hundreds of years ago. Though they have been routinely violated by writers from Shakespeare to Hemingway, two such "rules" are the prohibitions against split infinitives and ending a sentence with a preposition:

"The first prohibition against the split infinitive occurs in an 1834 article by an author identified only as "P." After that, increasingly over the course of the nineteenth century, a "rule" banning split infinitives began ricocheting from

grammar book to grammar book, until every self-conscious English-speaker 'knew' that to put a word between 'to' and a verb in its infinitive was barbaric.

"The split-infinitive rule may represent mindless prescriptivism's greatest height. It was foreign. (It was almost certainty based on the inability to split infinitives in Latin and Greek, since they consist of one word only.) It had been routinely violated by the great writers in English; one 1931 study found split infinitives in English literature from every century, beginning with the fourteenth-century epic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, through wrongdoers such as William Tyndale, Oliver Cromwell, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, John Donne, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and others.

"Rewording split infinitives can introduce ambiguity: 'He failed entirely to comprehend it' can mean he failed entirely, or he comprehended, but not entirely. Only putting 'entirely' between 'to' and 'comprehend' can convey clearly 'he comprehended most, but not all.' True, sentences can be reworded to work around the problem ('He failed to comprehend everything'), but there is no reason to do so. While many prescriptive rules falsely claim to improve readability and clarity, this one is worse, introducing a problem that wasn't there in the first place. Yet as split infinitives in fact became more common in nineteenth-century writing, condemnations of it grew equally strongly. The idea that 'rules' were more important than history, elegance, or actual practice ... held writers and speakers in terror of making them.

Author: Robert Lane Greene

Title: You Are What You Speak

Publisher: Delacorte Press

Date: Copyright 2011 by Robert Lane Greene

Pages: 33-34, 24-25

Split Infinitive?

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