Dr. Mary Ellen Guffey: No one fights much any more over split infinitives. Your second choice is not parallel and would probably be rejected for that reason.

Shelley List: Not being allowed to split infinitives because you couldn't split Latin infinitives (they are, after all, one word) isn't a good enough reason. A good rule of thumb: keep the interruption to one word. Don't let your reader lose track of the infinitive.

Paula Presley: Clearly B!! A offends my ears! (Even if the Enterprise did bravely go. . .)

Karen Powers: None of the above.

Maureen McAndrews: They're both grammatically incorrect and awkward.

Yvonne Klein: I feel deeply about keeping infinitives unsplit. I would prefer parallel structure, though: Bravely to fail is better than barely to try.

Tom Kreitzberg: To fail bravely is better than to barely try.

G. Miki Hayden: Gotta give a little for poetry's sake.

John David Lamb: No hard and fast rule here. Let your ear decide.

L. L. Thrasher: Sounds better. To boldly go...

Yocheved Golani: This is consistent with the grammatical standard for parallelism. The phrase has to be constructed similarly on each side of the divide.

Elizabeth Platt: If you're going to split infinitives, you should do so consistently. (

Beverly Foster: Flows better this way, and disrupting flow to adhere to a rule kind of defeats the purpose of writing.

Elayne Cree : I think split infinitives sometimes just sound better than the alternative.

Mark H. Bloom: Parallel construction.

Carrie Garbas: I don't think we're hung up on adverb placement anymore, are we?