I usually use some variant of “(see attachment)” or “please see the attached file”.
Because of this thread I am switching to “Attached please find” (from “Enclosed…”). The email literally says “Attached” and then the file so that is what I will go with.
I usually say “Attached please find.”
Or “Here’s what you wanted, jerkface.” Depends on who I’m typing to.
I do all the time. Two purposes:
- To make sure the person knows he’s supposed to open the attachment.
- To remind me to actually attach the file. :smack:
This discussion reminds me of a college class I took on Business English. In that course, the professor was trying to break people of the habit of using clumsy and cliched phrases like “Enclosed please find.” And the textbooks that we used agreed with the need to do away with such phrases in favor of something more modern.
That would have been in 1988 or so. So objections to the phrase seem to be pretty old, but don’t appear to have made much headway. 
Myself, I agree with the need to use the word “attached.” With our email system, the icon for the attachment is fairly small and doesn’t necessarily leap out at the reader. So it is helpful to cue them to the presence of an attachment. Typically I will write something like “The monthly report is attached. Please pay special attention to…”, etc.
In my mind, it’s not so much the “attached,” it’s the “please find.” Maybe it’s the lingering effects of that old Business English course, but “please find” strikes me as sort of archaic, like something out of a Victorian etiquette handbook. I wouldn’t write “please find,” unless my letter also included wording like “I beg to acknowledge receipt of yours of the 4th inst.,” and concluded with, “I have the honor to remain, My Dear Sir, your humble servant, MrAtoz.”
At work, my single goal is to handle my work as efficiently and correctly as possible; I don’t have the time or inclination to worry about someone’s choice of words; I simply want to understand what message is being conveyed so that I can take the appropriate action. I’m honestly surprised that anyone would be bothered by the use of a common phrase.
I’m even more surprised that a Professor would encourage his students to try and come up with a more “modern” way of saying something that is both brief and clear. If he were to actually work in an office, where it’s not unusual to handle 75-200 emails in one day, I daresay he’d abandon his effort to put style ahead of content.
I would use “I have attached”.
Well, as I say, it wasn’t just his particular quirk. We also used professionally published books on proper business writing that advised people to get rid of that phrase. It’s been more than 25 years now, so I can’t cite them, but I assure you they existed.
If I type “enclosed please find” into Google right now (as I just did, in fact), most of the first-page results point to articles in various sources, business and legal, saying “Don’t do this!” I think inertia will keep the phrase around for awhile to come, but opposition to it is not terribly hard to find either.
I was never taught that construction in my formal letter writing class (a part of learning to type.) I’ve always just used something like Chronos uses. Or even “I’ve attached…”
I was taught to put something like “Attachment Enclosed” at the bottom. I think it still serves a purpose: maybe your forgot to attach the document. That’s happened to me at least once, I think.
The rule of thumb for communication is that any word or phrase that is distracting (because it reads awkwardly or sounds outdated) should be avoided.
Is “attached please find” distracting? A little bit, for me. If English was my second language, I could see myself having a hard time parsing this too, not just because “find” is being used in an unusual way, but because the construction itself is uncommon in speech.
This is my guess as to why experts express displeasure with this practice.
I concur that “attached, please find” sounds archaic. I use it whenever possible, for exactly that reason. I find that mixing formal and casual elements in my writing can make for a more entertaining email-reading experience. My coworkers have generally given positive feedback for the resulting missives.
I don’t doubt that they did. But seeing how the phrase that these writers were admonishing their readers to abandon is still in common use 25 years later, that’s hardly a ringing endorsement for their “professional” advice. It also shows the disconnect between people who write about something vs. people who actually do it.
Yes, but the people who use this phrase on a daily basis don’t Google it to see if it is still acceptable. Why would they?
You think?
P.S. I could also find opposition, from professional business writers to Dopers, to the “business casual” dress code that most professional companies have switched to. It makes me wonder what motivates people to keep spinning their wheels in the sand over something so silly.
I don’t find anything wrong with the phrase, although I typically don’t use it. I’m more likely to specify “I have attached…”
You want a phrase to get up-in-arms about?
“Might you” as in “Might you want to fix that typo?” “Might you want to use the first photo I sent rather than the second?” Or even better “Might we want to rephrase that?”
AAAAGH. We might, We might not. We might want to punch your freakin’ twee head in every time you use this ridiculous approach. Just come out and say what you’re thinking rather than hiding behind this archaic phrasing to falsely imply some kind of subservience or politeness.
I use it all the time. I send out ebooks to reviewers, so a lot of my emails end with “Attached please find copies in epub, mobi, and PDF…”
It seems to work better than just pinning the document on there and going ‘here’s the book’. The use of the verb ‘attached’ seems important; it signals that there is a separate file tagging along, rather than a link or something pasted in the body of the email that’s been eaten by some server along the way.
The specific use of a stock phrase that contrasts to the informal tone of the rest of the message also seems to press some Pavlovian button that makes them look for the paper clip icon automatically. I get very few ‘where is the file?’ bounces when I use the stock phrase; if I say ‘here’s the book’ I always get a couple of clueless ‘where did you put it?’ replies.