Gerunds vs Infinitives After Clinical Verbs: Recommend Doing vs Recommend To Do

“I recommend to increase the dose.” Read it aloud and it sounds almost right — which is exactly the problem. “Recommend” never takes a bare to-infinitive in standard English, no matter how natural the sentence feels to the person who wrote it. Gerunds and infinitives after clinical verbs are one of the quietest, most repeatable sources of Language-criterion errors in OET writing, because the same handful of verbs — recommend, advise, suggest, avoid, consider — appear in almost every advice, referral, and discharge letter, and each one locks into its own fixed pattern.

Why do gerund and infinitive errors matter so much in OET letters?

Almost every advice, referral, and discharge letter exists to make a recommendation: take this medication, see this specialist, monitor this symptom. That means the handful of verbs used to introduce a recommendation — recommend, advise, suggest, consider — appear repeatedly across a single script, often three or four times in one letter. If a candidate has internalised the wrong pattern for one of these verbs, the error doesn’t appear once; it appears every time that verb is used, which multiplies a single grammatical gap into a repeated, examiner-visible pattern.

The clinical content can be exactly right — the correct medication, the correct specialist, the correct timeframe — while the sentence carrying that content fails on structure alone. That gap between sound clinical judgement and a verb pattern that doesn’t exist in standard English is precisely what this guide addresses.

Which pattern does “recommend” take — and why is “recommend to do” always wrong?

“Recommend” is the verb candidates get wrong most often, because the error sounds so close to correct. English allows exactly two structures after “recommend”, and a bare to-infinitive is not one of them:

• ❌ “I recommend to increase her fluid intake.”
• ✅ “I recommend increasing her fluid intake.” (gerund)
• ✅ “I recommend that she increase her fluid intake.” (that-clause, with the base form “increase” — not “increases”)

Note the second correct form uses the base verb form after “that”, not the third-person -s ending — “that she increase”, not “that she increases”. This is a subjunctive-style pattern that looks like an error to candidates who haven’t seen it before, but it’s the grammatically correct form in formal written English, and OET letters are formal written English.

There is no version of “recommend” followed directly by “to + verb” with no object in between. Candidates sometimes construct “recommend her to increase”, modelling it on “advise her to increase” — understandable, but still incorrect, because “recommend” does not take an object before the infinitive the way “advise” does.

How is “advise” different from “recommend”?

This is where the two verbs genuinely diverge, and conflating them is the second most common error in this category.

The pattern to notice: “advise” is the one verb in this group that can take an infinitive at all, and only when an object sits between the verb and the infinitive. Drop the object and you must switch to a gerund. This single distinction accounts for a large share of the confusion between “advise” and “recommend”, because candidates correctly learn that “advise” allows an infinitive and then wrongly extend that rule to “recommend”, which never does.

What about “suggest”, “avoid”, and “consider”?

These three are simpler than “recommend” and “advise” because each has only one family of correct patterns, with no infinitive option at all:

• “Suggest”: gerund or that-clause only. “I suggest reviewing her chart” or “I suggest that he review his medication.” Never “suggest to review.”
• “Avoid”: gerund only, always. “Avoid lifting heavy objects for six weeks.” Never “avoid to lift.”
• “Consider”: gerund only, in the recommendation sense used in clinical writing. “Please consider referring her to a dietitian.” Never “consider to refer.”

Because none of these three verbs offers an infinitive alternative the way “advise” does, the fix is simpler to apply consistently: if the verb is suggest, avoid, or consider, default to a gerund and don’t second-guess it.

Are there clinical verbs that take the infinitive, not the gerund?

Yes — a separate group of verbs expressing a plan, decision, or need takes the infinitive by default, and mixing these up with the recommend/suggest/avoid group in the other direction is just as common an error:

• “She plans to review the results next week.” (not “plans reviewing”)
• “He needs to monitor his blood pressure daily.” (not “needs monitoring” — note “needs monitoring” is actually valid English but means something different: that he himself requires monitoring, not that he must monitor something)
• “The team agreed to proceed with surgery.” (not “agreed proceeding”)
• “I would like to arrange a follow-up appointment.” (not “arrange arranging”)
• “She decided to refer the patient to cardiology.” (not “decided referring”)

The practical boundary: verbs that introduce a recommendation to someone else (recommend, advise, suggest) generally prefer the gerund or a that-clause; verbs that state your own plan, decision, or need (plan, need, want, agree, arrange, decide) take the infinitive. Knowing which category a verb falls into — not trying to apply one universal rule — is what actually prevents the error.

For the related question of how formal or direct a recommendation should sound once the grammar is correct, see our modals and hedging guide, which covers the politeness layer that sits on top of the verb pattern itself. And for the preposition errors that follow a similar logic after other clinical verbs — “referred to” not “referred for”, “compliant with” not “compliant to” — our clinical prepositions guide covers the companion error type.

How does this connect to the Language criterion?

Language is one of six official criteria set by Cambridge Boxhill Language Assessment (CBLA), the body that owns and administers OET, alongside Purpose, Content, Conciseness & Clarity, Genre & Style, and Organisation & Layout. It rewards accurate control of grammatical structures, and verb patterns — which verb takes which complement — sit squarely inside that range. A single “recommend to take” might look like a typo in isolation, but because the same verbs recur throughout an advice or discharge letter, the error tends to repeat, and a repeated structural error reads to an examiner as a gap in control rather than a one-off slip. Our Language criterion guide covers the other grammatical-range factors scored alongside verb patterns, and our OET advice letter guide walks through the letter type where recommend/advise/suggest patterns appear most densely.

A self-check for gerunds and infinitives before you submit

Run this check specifically on every sentence containing recommend, advise, suggest, avoid, or consider:

1. Circle the verb. Identify whether it belongs to the gerund-preferring group (recommend, suggest, avoid, consider) or the infinitive-preferring group (plan, need, want, agree, arrange, decide).
2. Check what comes right after it. For recommend/suggest/avoid/consider, the next word should end in “-ing” or the sentence should switch to “that + base verb.” Any “to + verb” directly after these four is an error.
3. Check “advise” separately. If there’s a named object (“her”, “him”, “the patient”) between “advise” and the verb, an infinitive is correct. If there’s no object, switch to a gerund.
4. Read the clause on its own. “Recommend to take” sounds almost acceptable inside a longer sentence but reads as clearly wrong once isolated — isolating the phrase is often enough to catch it.
5. Scan for repetition. If the same recommending verb appears three or more times in the letter, check that you’ve used the same correct pattern consistently each time, rather than getting it right once and wrong elsewhere.

This takes under two minutes once the two verb groups are memorised, and it catches an error type that a quick read-through rarely surfaces, because “recommend to take” doesn’t look foreign the way a spelling mistake does — it simply isn’t a pattern that exists in standard English.

The honest limit of self-editing for verb patterns

Verb-pattern errors are difficult to self-catch precisely because they don’t trigger the same alarm a spelling mistake does — the sentence reads smoothly to the person who wrote it, every time. The free Writing Checker is a useful first pass for surface grammar and spelling, but reliably flagging which of five or six recommending verbs takes which complement, across a full letter, under exam time pressure, is exactly the kind of check that benefits from an outside reader who already knows the fixed list. Our OET writing correction service has corrected 11,000+ letters since 2014 and reviews your actual letter against all six official criteria, including the verb-pattern accuracy that Language depends on — the part of your own writing that’s hardest to catch precisely because it already sounds right to you.