TOEIC Link Writing — Gerund and Infinitive Complementation Control

When a verb takes another verb as its object, English forces a choice between a gerund (-ing) and an infinitive (to + base form), and the choice is not free. I recommend hiring is correct and I recommend to hire is wrong; we managed to finish is correct and we managed finishing is wrong. A TOEIC Link Writing rater reads a wrong complement as a basic accuracy slip, and a response that argues well but writes I suggest to review the contract or they avoided to make a decision signals a writer whose grammar has not caught up to their ideas. This is one of the quiet tests the module runs on every response, because complementation errors appear in exactly the verbs a business writer reaches for — recommend, suggest, consider, manage, agree, avoid.

This article covers why the gerund-or-infinitive choice is governed by the main verb rather than by meaning, the small set of verbs where the two forms mean genuinely different things, the fixed patterns candidates most often break, and a four-week routine that makes the correct form automatic under exam timing.

The choice is governed by the main verb

The most important fact about gerund-and-infinitive complementation is that the choice is usually lexical, not logical — it is a property of the main verb, learned rather than reasoned out. Some verbs take only a gerund: avoid, consider, suggest, recommend, deny, postpone, finish, mind, risk. Some take only an infinitive: decide, agree, manage, offer, refuse, hope, plan, fail, afford. A writer cannot derive which group a verb belongs to from its meaning — suggest and offer are close in sense but take opposite complements — so the pattern has to be stored with the verb, the same way its spelling is. Candidates who try to reason the form out from meaning guess wrong on exactly the verbs that recur in business prose, which is why this shows up so reliably in scored writing.

A second, larger group takes either form with little or no change in meaning: begin, start, continue, like, prefer, bother. It began to rain and it began raining are both correct and mean the same thing. This group is forgiving, but it is the exception, and treating every verb as though it belonged here is how the errors happen. The safe default for a writer under pressure is to assume the choice is fixed and to know the fixed cases cold, reserving the free-choice group for the handful of verbs where either form genuinely lands.

The verbs where the form changes the meaning

A small set of verbs takes both forms but means something different with each, and here the wrong choice does not just misfire grammatically — it rewrites the sentence. Stop to do means pause in order to do something else; stop doing means cease the activity itself. We stopped to review the figures says the team paused for a review; we stopped reviewing the figures says they abandoned the review. Remember to send means do not forget the future action; remember sending means recall the past action. Remember to attach the invoice is a reminder; I remember attaching the invoice is a memory. Regret to inform introduces bad news being delivered now; regret informing expresses regret over having informed someone earlier. Try to open means attempt something difficult; try opening means experiment with a method to see if it helps.

These meaning-changing pairs matter more than the fixed-complement verbs because the reader has no way to recover the intended sense — the sentence is grammatical either way, so a rater reads exactly what the form says, not what the writer meant. A candidate who writes we regret to make this decision when they mean regret over a decision already taken has produced a correct sentence that reports the wrong thing, and that is harder for a rater to forgive than an obvious slip, because the error hides inside a well-formed clause.

The fixed patterns candidates most often break

Beyond single verbs, several fixed patterns govern the form and are broken often enough to be worth naming. Prepositions always take a gerund, never an infinitive: committed to improving, interested in expanding, responsible for reviewing — and because to is sometimes a preposition and sometimes an infinitive marker, look forward to hearing and be used to working take the gerund even though the to tempts writers toward the base form. This is the single most common complementation error in business writing, precise because it exploits the ambiguity of to, discussed alongside the collocation control covered in vocabulary precision and collocation discipline.

The second pattern is the verb-plus-object-plus-infinitive structure: advise, encourage, allow, enable, require, remind take an object and then an infinitive — we advised the client to wait, not we advised to wait or we advised waiting the client. The third is that adjectives and the impersonal it construction take an infinitive: it is important to confirm, we are ready to proceed, not it is important confirming. Storing these three patterns as wholes — preposition + gerund, verb + object + infinitive, adjective + infinitive — closes most of the gap, because they cover the frames a business argument is built from, and getting them right supports the syntactic control examined in clausal subordination and syntactic complexity calibration.

The four-week routine

Week one is inventory. Build two short lists — gerund-only verbs and infinitive-only verbs — from the verbs that recur in your own writing, and drill them until the form comes without hesitation. The goal is not to memorize a textbook's full list but to make automatic the twenty or so verbs a business writer actually uses, because those are the ones a rater will see.

Week two is the meaning-changing pairs. Take stop, remember, forget, regret, and try, and write two sentences for each verb — one with the gerund and one with the infinitive — that make the meaning difference visible. This trains the eye to see the form as a meaning choice, not just a grammar choice, which is what protects against the well-formed-but-wrong error.

Week three is the fixed patterns. Drill preposition-plus-gerund with the treacherous to cases (look forward to, be committed to, be used to), then verb-plus-object-plus-infinitive, then adjective-plus-infinitive, correcting seeded errors in each frame. This isolates the structural patterns from the single-verb lists so they do not blur together.

Week four is integration. Draft full responses under exam timing, then reread and check every verb-plus-verb junction: is the main verb gerund-only, infinitive-only, or free, and did the form follow? When the correct complement appears in the first draft rather than as a correction in the reread, the pattern has moved from knowledge into habit, which is the state the higher bands reward.

The takeaway

Gerund-and-infinitive control on TOEIC Link Writing rests on treating the choice as governed by the main verb, not derived from meaning: know the gerund-only and infinitive-only verbs cold, handle the meaning-changing pairs as deliberate sense choices, and store the three fixed patterns — preposition + gerund, verb + object + infinitive, adjective + infinitive — as wholes. Drill the verbs you actually use first, then the meaning pairs, then the patterns, until the correct form appears in the drafting pass rather than the editing one.