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Originally Posted by DarkScribe
To some they might not be regarded as errors, but to most erudite people they most definitely are regarded as errors. I regard them as errors, and so do most of the professionals I work with - even American professionals. American William Strunk's "The Elements of Style" regards split infinitives as constructs to be avoided. It also recommends avoiding beginning a sentence with a conjunction. It defines writers who do so as "unskilled". The same with most British style and writing guides.
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It is commonly believed by the public that splitting infinitives is wrong. No modern usage guide says so. (From Geoff Pullum "All the good usage manuals and scholarly grammars now recognise that phrases of this sort have occurred in English since its earliest history. They generally note that in many cases placing an adjunct between to and the verb is stylistically preferable to other orderings.")
Link is here:
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/grammar/splitinf.html
Here's a link to the M-W bit on prepositions at the end of sentences (under "prepositions at end."
http://books.google.com/books?id=2yJ...page&q&f=false
The whole bit is worth reading, but the takeaway is that it is a "cherished superstition."
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If writing one way will offend some people, and you are able to write in a manner perceived by all to be acceptable, why risk alienating any of your potential readers? Doing so seems foolish and pointless to me. People who are accepting of poor style or grammar will not be put off by an author writing well, while those who are not accepting of such things are an audience lost if you fail to write well.
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I don't see the point it mangling the English language to uphold the cherished superstitions of those with an incomplete understanding of English. (To the extent that's even possible; there's not a way to write the perfectly English sentence "What are you looking for?" in a manner that doesn't end the sentence with a preposition ("For what are you looking?" isn't a substitute.)