A person gave me an answer on English.SE and I commented:
Thank you for taking your time writing this wonderful answer!
Now, looking at the sentence in retrospect, even though I am not a native English speaker (duh, otherwise I wouldn't be asking a question on ELL.SE), I find the sentence a bit odd.
To get my point across, let me rephrase the sentence:
Thank you for taking your time to write this wonderful answer!
With my relatively little knowledge and understanding of English, I feel that using 'writing' (as I did in the original sentence) emphasizes the very process of writing the answer, whereas using 'to write' emphasizes the mere fact that an answer has been given, and a wonderful one at that.
This is exactly why I feel the original sentence is a little bit awkward and the second, revised one would have been more apt.
Am I correct or are the quoted sentences virtually synonymous?
Answer
taking your time means doing something slowly: this is probably not the meaning that you want! The correct expression to use is "taking the time".
The gerund works with taking your time:
You are taking your time writing those letters- get a move on!
But idiomatically the gerund doesn't work with taking the time. The idiomatic version is therefore
Thank you for taking the time to write this wonderful answer!
Here is an NGram that shows that the infinitive form is common but the gerund is never used.
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