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I was wondering if it is more correct to say:

"It is considered not good practice to ..."

or

"It is not considered good practice to ..."

And the whole sentence that I'm trying to build should read something like this:

"It is considered not good practice to having only the team of specialists maintaining the 'Continuous Integration' system.

Re-Edit------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ without 'to' in the sentence

"It is considered not good practice having only the team of specialists maintaining the 'Continuous Integration' system."

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  • I wasn't really sure if to put an 'a' or not, before the adjective 'good', even after reading this post: english.stackexchange.com/questions/73956/… Commented Apr 29, 2020 at 5:44
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    '...not good practice to have...' Commented Apr 29, 2020 at 9:19
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    @KateBunting Yes, I accept that that would be an alternative to including "to having". Often one is faced with the choice of infinitive or present participle e.g "I like to have my feet tickled" versus "I like having my feet tickled". But what is not correct is "I like to having my feet tickled".
    – WS2
    Commented Apr 29, 2020 at 9:30

1 Answer 1

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First, as a peripheral issue, you really need a comma after "to", as the rest of the sentence is a separate dependent clause.

As regards your main query - the two forms do get used interchangeably.

However if you think about it logically, they mean slightly different things. "It is not considered good practice" means no one considers it.

But "It is considered not good practice", means that people do think about it but take the view that it is not good practice.

But for all practical purposes, "not considered" is perhaps just a slightly less emphatic way of saying the same thing as "considered not".

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  • The OP's use of suspension points after 'to' indicate that he intended the sentence to go on to state what was not good practice. Commented Apr 29, 2020 at 8:00
  • @KateBunting I take your point. However in that case a comma in the full sentence, after "to", would have been helpful. However I will edit my answer accordingly. (It just shows how the absence of punctuation can cause a sentence entirely to be misread.)
    – WS2
    Commented Apr 29, 2020 at 9:14
  • No comma is needed after to. Commented Apr 29, 2020 at 9:18
  • @KateBunting Well if you are accepting that interpretation, (which was my first one) the word "to" could certainly be eliminated without any loss of meaning, and less confusion - in my view.
    – WS2
    Commented Apr 29, 2020 at 9:27

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