What is the correct way to write the following sentence?
“Enclosed please find a copy and an original of the Joint Defense Agreement signed by Ms. Soso and me.”
i think it should say “myself” and a coworker says it should say “me.”
Would you say “…signed by myself”?
Pretty sure it would be me.
If you want to be prescriptively correct, you must use “me” here. However, “myself” is common in this kind of environment (and is many a grammarian’s pet peeve), and some scholars have hypothesized that this is due to unease over whether “me” or “I” is correct (“myself” being a way to avoid having to make the choice).
Your co-worker is correct. “Myself” should be used only as a reflexive (I hit myself) or as an intensifier (I myself believe that to be true). Your sentence calls for the simple objective case: “signed by . . . me.”
I had a boss once who loved to use “myself” incorrectly in this manner, and it drove me bonkers. One time he made it even worse: “Myself and Tom enjoyed meeting you . . .” Gah! I beg you, don’t do it.
Scarlett, freelance copyeditor
I think your pal is right. “Myself” is often misused, just like “between you and I,” but it’s a reflexive pronoun, which means that its use implies that you are both the subject and the object of some action — I accidentally hit myself, or I included myself in the list of candidates.
Unless the document was tattooed on your skin, signing it was not doing anything to you.
Of course, it would be much better writing if you left out the “Enclosed please find.” Just use, “Here is.”
“Enclosed please find” is an anachronism; you might as well sign the letter, “Your humble and obedient servant.”
It’s one of my pet peeves - sometime in the last five years or so, the general public developed a unreasonable hatred for the words “me” and “I” and started refusing to use them. My rule of thumb as already referenced in this thread is if I take the other word out, would “myself,” “I,” or “me” be correct?
A stylistic nitpick - I’d put original first and copy second, just because that seems more logical to me (the original came first, then the copy). 
End with, “and by me.”
Ms. Soso and I have signed the Joint Defense Agreement; the original and a copy are enclosed.
Ooh, that’s nice - clear and succinct.
+1.
When in doubt, rephrase.
Gets rid of the horrible passive voice too. Passive voice is intensely hated by me.
Only halfway, actually.
Since it’s a document about defense and armaments wouldn’t that make it passive-aggressive?
The OP says “an original”, and several responses have changed that to “the original”. Did the OP really mean to imply that there is more than one original of the agreement? Or are those who have changed it right?
I disagree.
First, on the general principle that I don’t feel you should rephrase when you encounter difficulties in a sentence. Use the difficulty as a challenge to write better.
Second, the proposed change alters the message. It changes the message from “here is the paperwork” to “this is what’s been done”. The former implies the goal has been reached and the job is done; the latter implies that there’s a chain of events going on and the process may still be ongoing. In addition, the former implies that the recipient is the central figure - the process was done to get the agreement to him. While the latter implies that the writer is the central figure - the one who followed the process through its steps, which included sending it to the recipient.
As an aside, I agree with Cat Whisperer; “the original and a copy” is better than “a copy and an original”. (In either order, it should be “the original”.)
You’re welcome to disagree with my proposed solution. However, since we’re not talking about a poem or other work where creativity is the heart of the process, my answer to the above statement would be that writing more clearly – with less room for confusion, misunderstanding, and reliance upon arcane distinctions between prescriptivist grammar and descriptivist grammar – is writing “better.” Your argument that my reworking of the original somehow changes the esoteric implications about the actions that have been taken and their symbolic connotations about the relationship between writer and reader are fine for a literary analysis. As far as I can tell the entire purpose of the text in question, though, is to communicate “x got done, and here’s the proof,” largely to avoid sending signed documents in an envelope unexplained.
Sometimes the difficulty exists because the original phrasing sucks.
What evidence do you have that something like this has changed in the “last five years or so”? As evidence against your claim, I offer just a few of literally dozens of nonstandard uses of myself taken from Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage and dating between 1782 and 1981:
But that’s not the case here. “The agreement was signed by Ms. Soso and me” is a legitimate sentence. The question is whether it should be “and me” or “and I” or “and myself”. You could avoid the issue by reworking the sentence so it doesn’t occur but the real solution is to learn which usage is correct.