Is "please find enclosed the attachment" grammatical? [closed]
In my office everyone uses "Please find enclosed the attachment" in emails.
I can't digest the "the" between "enclosed" and "attachment". Is the sentence grammatical?
Solution 1:
As both Greg and Colin point out, there is nothing in this sentence that violates any of the grammatical principles English sentences must adhere to. There is, however, something that make it violate certain semantic requirements for well-formed sentences.
The definite article has two basic uses (very roughly generalised):
It is used to describe certain things that are uniquely named or specified, or to a class of another class. For example, ‘the definite article’ is a unique specification, as it refers not just to any article that happens to be definite (‘a definite article’ works for that), but to the specific grammatical element the in the English language.
When used with words that are not uniquely specified, it is used only when the noun it determines is defined and identifiable to the listener in the discourse that is currently taking place. When something has already been established in the context, a definite article may (and in many cases must) be used; if it is introduced to the discourse for the first time and no prior framework for it exists, a definite article cannot be used.
Now in your example, “the attachment” is not a uniquely specified thing—there is no specific thing ‘named’ The Attachment, so to speak. Therefore, in order to merit the definite article, the discourse/context must already have made it clear what attachment we are talking about. If this has been done, your sentence is fine, but it requires a specific kind of scenario; for example:
Jane sent me an e-mail with some huge file attached this morning. I don’t know what it was, but something must have been wrong somewhere, ’cause the attachment made my entire computer crash when I tried to open it.
When writing an e-mail, though, ‘attachment’ is a very vague word. It tells you that a file of some sort is being sent along, but it does not mention what file it is, nor what is contained in that file. Therefore, a scenario like the above is not very likely—when we receive something as an attachment, we tend to prefer to call the thing we’ve received by its proper name/description, rather than just calling it ‘the attachment’. As such, we rarely find ourselves defining ‘attachment’ in a discourse.
As such, saying merely, “Please find enclosed the attachment” will sound very strange to most people. The immediate reaction is, “What attachment?”—not because we don’t know how to look for an attachment to an e-mail, but because the definite article makes us immediately think that this is something that should be familiar to me. If you have not just defined ‘an attachment’ in the previous text, people won’t know what attachment you are talking about.
Of course, changing the wording to using an indefinite article (appropriate when introducing a new thing to the discourse) won’t work either: if you say, “Please find enclosed an attachment”, people are just going to wonder if you do not even know what attachment you are sending along.
The best way to solve this is to tell people what you are sending along. This is, in fact, common practice in English—as Colin’s example amply illustrates.
Also, you should note that ‘enclose’ and ‘attach’ basically mean the same thing. The only difference between them is that ‘attach’ is used only for electronic communication, while ‘enclose’ is used mostly for non-electronic communication (where enclosing something actually means physically enclosing it inside the envelope). Using both together is somewhat redundant and unnecessary.
It is therefore more common to write in an e-mail, “Please find attached [something or other]”, rather than, “Please find enclosed [something] as attachment”. So if you are sending an agenda for a meeting, for example, simply write:
Please find attached the agenda for the meeting.
Solution 2:
It is grammatical, but not idiomatic (at least in my idiolect). Enclosed is a modifier for the verb phrase, somewhat equivalent to a prepositional phrase (PP) like on the table or in the waste-bin.
A more normal order would be Please find the attachment enclosed; but when the object is a "heavy" phrase, then it is common to put the complement before it, as
Please find enclosed my response to Mr Smith's email.
Solution 3:
The past participle, "enclosed" is actually functioning as an adverb of condition to modify "find." You'll find this in poetry a lot. E.g. ". . . find unwithered on its curls" from A. E. Houseman's "To an Athlete Dying Young." It is not just limited to the verb "find." E.g. "They fired unplanned the fatal volley."
The language of letter writing contains many old-fashioned expressions, and this is just one of them. That said, in modern American usage, most of us would just say "Please see the attachment."