'The information entered' or 'The entered information'?

Question

Regards.. I would like to discuss about the comparison of the following two sentences :

We provide the information entered to the management.

We provide the entered information to the management.

I am confident that the word 'entered' here acts as an adjective for the object information, so the second sentence is correct and more appropriate than the first one.

But I also had found the first sentence in an official organization and company website.

The grammar rule in particular but not limited to it, may I have some view on this?

Answer 1

We send management the entered data.

We send management the data entered.

In the first case, entered is the past participle of enter functioning as an adjective.

In the second case, entered is a the same past participle as post-positioned modifier, a reduced clause.

If there is any slight difference between them, I would say the first refers to the data as being now in the database and the second refers to the information as having been entered into the database, that is the second retains a stronger sense of the data-entry process.

We bring on a team of unpaid interns to read through the material and enter the data into the database, and then we send management the {entered data|the data entered} in the form of an exported CSV file.

Answer 2

I think both sentences are technically correct, but the second sentence sounds a little better.

In the first sentence, a reader might be confused, thinking that the prepositional phrase to the management refers to entered, not information. The verb enter does not use to (it does not make sense), and so this would probably be confusing to the reader.

Although you can invert entered with information, you should probably avoid the first sentence for the reason above.

Also, instead of the management, it might be slightly better to say, simply, management.

We provide the entered information to management.

Answer 3

1. We provide the information entered to the management.
2. We provide the entered information to the management.

I'll have to respectfully disagree with Ringo. I don't think the possible ambiguity in sentence 1 that he discusses is really a big deal. I did not find the first sentence especially ambiguous.

Hard for me to really describe why, but as a native American English speaker, the first option is the one that sounds better to me in the context provided: on a company's website.

I take it that the text was just above or below a webform, where people could type in some comments that some employee of the company would relay to management. With that assumption...

• Saying "information entered" gives me more of an impression that the user is the one doing the entering.
• Saying "entered information" makes it sound like the information was already entered (by someone else), and it's gonna be relayed to the management.

But the second scenario doesn't really make sense. Likely, the website is trying to communicate that whatever you, the user, enter into that webform will be passed on to management. So "information entered" would be the way to go.

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With regards to the second sentence being more correct because "entered" is an adjective describing "information," I do not think the fact that "entered" is modifying "information" dictates that it has to come before "information."

There are plenty of perfectly grammatical sentences you could construct in English where the modifier could come after the word it's modifying. As such, I think the word order in this case would be dictated by what meaning you want to convey, as outlined above. But again, I can't really point you to a grammar rule that explains why I interpret the two sentences how I do.