more. Here traditional idiom, placing the negation before the marker (I soon learned not to provoke her) or with verbs of desire, negating the finite verb (I don't want to see you anymore) remains easy and natural, and is still overwhelmingly the more common construction. Some argue that the two forms have different meanings, while others see a grammatical difference, but most speakers do not make such a distinction. In an example drawn from 3121 sampled usages by the British National Corpus, the use of to not be (versus not to be) is only 0.35%. Avoiding split infinitives Writers who avoid splitting infinitives either place the splitting element elsewhere in the sentence or reformulate the sentence, perhaps rephrasing it without an infinitive and thus avoiding the issue. However, a sentence such as "to more than double" must be completely rewritten to avoid the split infinitive; it is ungrammatical to put the words "more than" anywhere else in the sentence. While split infinitives can be avoided, a writer must be careful not to produce an awkward or ambiguous sentence. Fowler (1926) stressed that, if a sentence is to be rewritten to remove a split infinitive, this must be done without compromising the language: It is of no avail merely to fling oneself desperately out of temptation; one must so do it that no traces of the struggle remain; that is, sentences must be thoroughly remodeled instead of having a word lifted from its original place & dumped elsewhere … In some cases, moving the adverbial creates an ungrammatical sentence or changes the meaning. R. L. Trask uses this example: She decided to gradually get rid of the teddy bears she had collected. "Gradually" splits the infinitive "to get." However, if the adverb were moved, where could it go? She decided gradually to get rid of the teddy bears she had collected. This might imply that the decision was gradual. She decided to get rid of the teddy bears she had collected gradually. This implies that the collecting process was gradual. She decided to get gradually rid of the teddy bears she had collected. This sounds awkward, as it splits the phrase "get rid of." She decided to get rid gradually of the teddy bears she had collected. Trask considers this almost as unwieldy as its immediate predecessor. Gradually, she decided to get rid of the teddy bears she had collected. This