5 exercises — practise placing adverbs correctly around infinitives in specs, docs, and blog posts.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
Which sentence uses a split infinitive that most style guides consider natural and idiomatic in technical writing?
A split infinitive places an adverb between "to" and the base verb: "to quickly refactor". Option B is natural and idiomatic — modern style guides (including Microsoft's and Google's developer documentation guides) accept split infinitives when the alternative sounds stilted or changes emphasis. "To quickly refactor the module" reads naturally and keeps the adverb close to the verb it modifies. Option C moves "quickly" to the end, which is also grammatical but slightly weaker in emphasis. Option D ("to refactor quickly the module") is ungrammatical — the adverb cannot separate the verb from its direct object. Option A misplaces "quickly" entirely, making it modify "decided" rather than "refactor".
2 / 5
In API documentation, which sentence avoids a split infinitive while preserving the intended meaning?
Option C avoids splitting "to generate" by placing "programmatically" after the object ("access tokens"), which is the standard way to un-split an infinitive without sounding awkward. Option A splits the infinitive ("to programmatically generate") — acceptable in most contexts, but the question asks for the version that avoids the split. Option B is awkward because the adverb interrupts the verb-object pairing without any grammatical justification. Option D ("you programmatically to generate") is ungrammatical — an adverb cannot precede a bare "to" infinitive marker like that in standard English.
3 / 5
Which sentence demonstrates a split infinitive that changes meaning if "un-split", making the split preferable?
In option A, "to actually solve" places emphatic "actually" directly before the verb it intensifies, giving the strongest contrastive emphasis against "just patch the symptom". Moving "actually" elsewhere (options B and C) weakens or garbles that emphasis — option C is outright ungrammatical, and option B sounds archaic and stilted. Option D moves "actually" to a sentence-initial position, which changes its scope from modifying "solve" to modifying the whole clause, softening the contrast. This is a case where keeping the split infinitive is the clearest and most natural choice — a useful counterexample to the outdated "never split an infinitive" rule.
4 / 5
A style guide for a documentation team recommends avoiding split infinitives in formal specs. Which rewrite of "The API is designed to seamlessly integrate with existing pipelines" follows that recommendation?
Option A correctly un-splits the infinitive by moving "seamlessly" after the verb phrase it modifies ("integrate with existing pipelines"), producing a clean, formal sentence with no ambiguity. Option B moves the adverb to before "to", which sounds unnatural and could be misread as modifying "designed". Option C introduces an incorrect comma that breaks the prepositional phrase. Option D fronts the adverb, shifting emphasis to the whole sentence rather than to how the integration happens. In formal RFCs and specs where some style guides still discourage split infinitives, moving the adverb after the full verb phrase (as in A) is the standard fix.
5 / 5
Which sentence contains an awkward, unnecessary split infinitive that should be revised for a polished engineering blog post?
Option B is awkward because it splits the infinitive with a long, multi-clause adverbial phrase ("carefully and, after extensive testing over several sprints, thoroughly") — the sheer distance between "to" and "roll out" makes the sentence hard to parse. Style guides generally tolerate splitting an infinitive with a single short adverb (as in options A, C, and D — "gradually", "fully", "soon"), because those keep the sentence readable. The rule of thumb for technical writing is not "never split an infinitive" but "do not let the split create distance or ambiguity between the verb and its subject/object". Option B should be revised, e.g., "After extensive testing over several sprints, we plan to roll out the feature carefully and thoroughly."