Adverbs - they can go anywhere, but that doesn't mean they can go anywhere

This also came up at work today. Someone asked me to offer a correction to this sentence:

We mainly encounter this phrase in widely used today prayers written several centuries ago.

She said she was torn between a wordy relative clause such as

We mainly encounter this phrase in prayers widely used today which were written several centuries ago.

or this more streamlined version

We mainly encounter this phrase today in widely used prayers written several centuries ago.

I offered her this:

We mainly encounter this phrase in prayers widely used today but written several centuries ago.

though the relative clause version is fine - as are several others.

But not her other attempt.

The original sentence reads like a translation from some language which allows heavy modifiers in front of nouns (which English doesn't). But her other attempt commits the sin of moving the adverb "today" and making it modify the wrong thing: in the original it modifies "used"; in her rewrite it modifies "encounter". All she moved was the prepositional "in widely used prayers" - which does have to be moved - but she separated out part of it and left it behind. Hers sounds just fine, and is perfectly grammatical; it just doesn't mean the same thing.

You have to be careful in rewrites that you don't change the meaning. Keep all the parts of a unit together.