“Please Find Attached”: Is It Correct Grammar, and Should You Still Write It?

Two verdicts, kept strictly apart. On grammar: “Please find attached the report” passes every test. Find is a correctly formed imperative; the report is its object; attached is an object complement — a past participle doing the job of an adjective. On usage: it is a fossil. It belongs to the same nineteenth-century clerical stratum as “yours faithfully” rituals, and the plain-English movement has spent decades recommending simpler lines. Modern business-writing guides agree on the fix: “I’ve attached the report.”

So why spend a guide on a phrase you are being told to drop? Because the construction underneath it is not going anywhere. Find + object + complement lives all over formal and informal English — “you’ll find the instructions enclosed,” “we found the door locked,” “I found the meeting useful.” Once you can see the pattern, you can reorder the boilerplate without guessing, catch the tense mistakes that surround real attachment problems, and understand precisely what you are declining when you choose the modern version. That is worth ten minutes.

The diagram below parses the sentence into its three working parts and shows the two legal word orders. Sections 2 through 6 build from there: the rule itself, the tenses that actually cause damage, the history behind the stiffness, lines you can copy, and the mistakes the boilerplate hides.

Strip the please and the ceremony and the sentence reduces to one verb pattern: find + object + complement. Find here is not “locate after searching”; it is the perception sense — discover something to be such-and-such — and the complement (here the past participle attached, used adjectivally) describes the state in which you will discover it. The same verb gives us “I found the movie long” and “she found the task impossible,” where the complement is an adjective. Swap the adjective for a participle and you have email boilerplate.

Because the parts are ordinary, the order is negotiable — up to a point. “Please find the report attached” is the canonical verb-object-complement arrangement, and it is fully grammatical. “Please find attached the report” is what actually gets written, and it is grammatical too. The fixed boilerplate order exists because English likes long, information-heavy chunks at the end of a clause — the principle linguists call end-weight. Fronting the short complement (attached) gives room to the heavier noun phrase (the report, or worse, my updated resume and cover letter for the Senior Analyst position). The test of the rule is the pronoun: light words refuse to move, so “please find it attached” works while “please find attached it” collapses.

The construction is a live citizen of English, not an email resident only:

The last two have nothing to do with correspondence, which is the point: whoever dismisses “please find attached” as bad grammar is dismissing a pattern that native speakers use without friction every day. One more distinction the boilerplate keeps alive: attached means fastened to the message itself — the sense is literal for email, where the file rides on the message — while enclosed means put inside the envelope. “Please find enclosed” still fits a printed letter with pages tucked in; in email it is a postal metaphor wearing a stamp. In practice, both are clichés in the same sentence — find is the verb doing the cliché work.

Here is where email-attachment English actually breaks, because “please find attached” dodges a decision every real sentence has to make: tense. Four choices, each with its own job.

For a file in the current email, the present perfect is the usual choice: I have attached the report. Present perfect highlights the present result. With a finished event time, use simple past: I attached it yesterday. Choose the tense for the intended context rather than rejecting an accepted regional form.

Style guides object to “please find attached” for a reason you can feel without any linguistic training: the sentence is quietly insulting to the reader. Find presupposes a hunt. The imperative instructs someone to discover something that is sitting visibly in front of them — the paperclip icon, the file name, the download prompt. Nobody hunts for an attachment; attachments are among the least hard-to-find things in a modern inbox. An instruction to perform an unnecessary act, however polite in form, lands as padding.

The stiffness has a date of origin. In nineteenth-century commercial correspondence, a clerk physically enclosed separate sheets in the envelope; the recipient cut it open and genuinely had to find the inserted pages before reading them. “Please find attached” — attached originally meaning fastened, tied to the letter — described real logistics. The logistics changed; the sentence stayed, first surviving the envelope, then the fax, and now the cloud link. By 1948, when Ernest Gowers published Plain Words to tidy up official British prose, letter boilerplate was already a target: he advised clerks not to write “your favour of the 3rd instant” but plain language like “your letter of 3 March.” Nearly eighty years of the same advice, and the fossils kept shipping.

“Attached herewith please find” deserves special mention: it is a double archaism, one fossil glued to another. Herewith means “with this” and is functionally dead outside legal templates, where it survives as a seriousness signal. Stack the two and you get the clerical equivalent of a horse-drawn ambulance — the same family of business-English fossils covered in our sibling guides to “as per your request” and “do the needful.”

In fairness: stiff is not the same as wrong, and formality is sometimes the message. A bank cover note for a deed of variation benefits from sounding like a deed. The problem is that most writers deploy the boilerplate by reflex, not by design — and a reflex that cannot be switched off is indistinguishable from an error.

Replacing the cliché takes one sentence per situation, and the upgrades are not about being politer — they are about being specific enough to be useful:

Notice the principle behind all six, and make it a habit: name the file and name the action. The reader should never have to open something to learn what it is, or finish reading to learn what you want. “Please find attached the document” fails both tests at once — no name, no ask — which is the real reason it survived so long: it commits to nothing, which may be part of why it has lasted so long. If you are following up because nobody opened anything, the harder problem is the request itself; our guide to asking for an update in email covers that phrasing.

When is the boilerplate fine? Where formality is the message: legal cover notes, registry filings, notarial correspondence — ritual language where both parties expect ritual and would notice its absence. That is a narrow, deliberate exception, and it is a choice you should be able to make. The wider the relationship, the more the clichés of business English quietly cost you; the catalogue in our business-email mistakes guide shows which neighbors to clear out while you are at it.

Once the boilerplate goes away, five smaller traps remain. Each is a sentence a careful reader will notice.

And before you send any of the corrected versions, run the draft through a free grammar checker — forgetting the attachment itself is still one of the easiest mistakes to make.