• My Saved Resume

When I was new to the job market and mailing out resumes (although I’m dating myself, I’ll admit that this was well before the days of email), I sent my carefully crafted cover letters with a note that read: Enclosed please find my resume. One such mailing resulted in an interview. There I was in the wood-paneled office of an immaculately groomed lawyer. While I waited anxiously in an oversized leather wingback chair, he sat at his desk clicking his pen top and scanning my resume and cover letter.

He looked up suddenly and grinned, pointing at the letter. “I love it when people write ‘Enclosed please find my resume.’ I didn’t even know your resume was lost!” It was an embarrassing moment. I’d mimicked the business letter style I’d been taught in high school typing class, not to mention every other business letter I’d seen or received. But this interviewer pointed out just how inane and stuffy business-speak can be. I never used enclosed please find again. These days, we’re more likely to want to call attention to attachments than items included with a mailed letter, but people still use please find attached all the time. Is this business writing holdover necessary?

My Saved Resume

Is there any reason to use please find attached? There’s no need for this phrase.

And there are several great reasons to dump it. For starters, it sounds stuffy and old-fashioned. Even in formal correspondence, your goal should be to communicate in a straightforward, conversational way, free of. Please find attached is wordy jargon at its worst. It’s also a bit redundant to say that something is attached and then direct the recipient to please find it. Another oddity with attached please find is that it’s a command when it doesn’t need to be. The popular English language blog,, puts it this way: There’s no need to boss around the other person to go about finding things, since the sentence is just communicating “I have attached a document for you”.