Fourth email

Hi Sebastien,

Very good question.  What you initially used and what your friend said are both OK.  Passive voice is a special case when it comes the the location of adverbs.  

You can hereby find a more in depth explanation of the position of adverbs in sentences.

Best,

John

   Hi John,

    I'm very happy that you sent me these PDF because, this afternoon, with some colleagues, I discussed a document that described the interface of a future IT system. Without entering too much into details, we were studying the creation of groups (of agricultural products, but that's not important). After a series of actions, the system is supposed to give a feedback to the user to confirm that everything is in order. The message proposed was "the group has been successfully created". This sounds good for me, at first sight. But, then, remembering my english course, I thought "shouldn't it be "the group has successfully been created"". After some thoughts, an Englishman told us that the correct form should probably be "the group has been created successfully".

    So, I googled it to have the answer, and it turned out that,
* The most common form is "has been successfully created" (900.000 results)
* After comes "has been created successfully" (460 000 results)
* Number 3 is "has sucessfully been created" (only 165 000 results) (I checked and, according to the course, this should be the correct form).

    So, I'm very confused. Could it be that:
* this is yet another exception to the general rules
* or that, the correct grammatical form is less used that the incorrect ones?
    In the meantime, I don't know what I should write in the document!

   Do you have an explanation?

    Thanks a lot in advance and have a nice evening,
   Sébastien.