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Take this sentence as an example:

You may want to consider placing the money in a more conservative portfolio and move on with life.

The expression "move on with life" is fine by itself, but "moving on with life" brings in ample amount of Google results as well. But shouldn't "move" be in gerund form much like "placing"? So:

You may want to consider placing the money in a more conservative portfolio and moving on with life.

When in doubt, I like to shorten the sentence to get rid of the noise, to something that is still structurally the same. Such as

You may want to consider burning the money and moving on with life.

Here the two verbs are much closer and I wouldn't even consider writing move.

Firsh - justifiedgrid.com
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    No: the coordination consists of the two clauses "to consider placing the money in a more conservative portfolio" and "move on with life", both of which are infinitivals. – BillJ Feb 21 '23 at 14:53
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    I don't see anything wrong with "You may want to [consider burning the money] and [move on with life]. – BillJ Feb 21 '23 at 15:01
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    Either gerunds or infinitives will work after consider. But they hafta be the same on both sides of the conjunction for Conjunction Reduction to produce grammatical output. – John Lawler Feb 21 '23 at 15:27

2 Answers2

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It's not a matter of "to the end of the sentence": it's a matter of the (semantic) scope of "consider".

In your original example, both are possible, but they have logically different structures, though little practical difference in meaning.

Moving on is within the scope of "consider": something else you may want to consider.

Move on is outside the range of "consider", but still within the range of "want": something else you may want to do (separately from considering).

Colin Fine
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Expanding a bit on the other answer:

You may want to consider placing the money in a more conservative portfolio and move on with life.

This sentence is fine. The conjunction "and" is here interpreted as joining "consider placing the money in a more conservative portfolio" and "move on with life."

You may want to consider placing the money in a more conservative portfolio and moving on with life.

This sentence is also fine. The conjunction "and" is here interpreted as joining "placing the money in a more conservative portfolio" and "moving on with life."

The second sentence certainly sounds better, and it avoids breaking the nonexistent rule against split infinitives, but both are correct, with (subtly) different meanings. To see the difference, it may help to rephrase them slightly:

  1. You may want to consider placing the money in a more conservative portfolio and to move on with life.
  2. You may want to consider both placing the money in a more conservative portfolio and moving on with life.
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