Infinitives vs Gerunds

A bridge is like writing providing communication with the former conveying physical movements while the latter, flows of ideas.





Sometimes, you have to be attentive and logical to discover the common faults in writing.

Below is an example.

A group of people get together for no reason other than to do things in unison - and to have fun, of course.

The above sentence is taken from the OVERVIEW section of a popular national English daily.

At a glance, you will not notice anything wrong with the sentence.

Now, if you take out the phrase no reason other than, what remains is: A group of people get together for to do things in unison - and to have fun, of course.

Then, you will see that the sentence is unsound or ungrammatical - after the preposition for you cannot have an infinitive to do but you need a gerund doing (verbal noun) as the function of a preposition is to express some relation between two persons or things. In this case, it shows the relation between people and doing and should be followed by having, another verbal noun (instead of the infinitive to have).

The whole sentence should, therefore, have been: A group of people get together for no reason other than doing things in unison - and having fun, of course.

However, if you wish to retain the two infinitives, to do and to have, then we can make them noun-infinitives (to be in apposition with the noun reason) to define the reason and recast the sentence as follows:-

A group of people get together for a reason - to do things in unison and to have fun, of course.