carry on one's work vs. carry one's work on

Question

He carried on his work. vs. He carried his work on.

Is there any difference between the two sentences?

I see the first one 'He carried on his work.' more often.

Answer 1

Prepositions can be placed differently, often without any change in meaning.

For example:

• Pull up your pants.
• Pull your pants up.

'Carry on' is a phrasal verb. Notice how it is listed in Cambridge Dictionary:

carry (something) on
to continue doing something, or to cause something to continue

Even the listing shows that you can put the object (something) between the verb and the preposition, and it isn't uncommon:

• He carried on doing it for years.
• he carried it on for years.

From a purely grammatical point of view, there's nothing wrong with either of your examples.

However, 'carry on' is definitely more idiomatic. One reason why a particular phrasing becomes more idiomatic than another is to avoid ambiguity, and that certainly seems the case with this phrase. Separately, the two words have other meanings. For example:

He carried his bags on to the plane.

This has nothing to do with 'carrying on' in the sense of 'continuing', so we would not say "he carried on his bags to the plane". It makes sense to keep the phrase together when you are using it in the sense of continuing something.