“Please find attached your confirmation of enrolment letter.” Why is “attached” put before “your”? Would “..your attached …” mean something else? Thanks.

It’s just a weird email formality. “Your enrollment letter is attached to this email” would sound too blunt, so people prefer to say, “Please find attached your enrollment letter.” It honestly has no impact on your English learning otherwise. I’m a native English speaker and I would never use this phrasing out loud, but at work I have learned that this is the “polite” way to phrase an email.

It’s a formal construction used in correspondence. Among other things things it alerts to recipient to the fact there is an important attached document. Really it’s a carryover from “enclosed” in paper correspondence. There are standard rules for referring to enclosures (documents sent with the letter).

Please find attached (to this document/email) your confirmation of enrolment letter. It's just a way of saying that the confirmation letter is included with the document or email. Similarly "Please find enclosed..." is used for physical documents included in an envelope with the letter - and you might use "Please find attached" with physical documents if they're stapled to the letter.

Formal writing in English, as well as formal scripted English, allows for different sentence structure than normal natural speech. We wouldn’t say “Please find your attached confirmation…” though. You would put it at the very end: Please find your confirmation of enrollment attached. But that kind of sounds awkward for formal writing. Oftentimes formal writing likes to break up the verb and object; something that natural speech would (almost?) never do. This is perfectly normal for formal writing in many circumstances, though.

“Please find attached” (or enclosed) is a fixed phrase normally only used in writing in a business context. It’s a pretty common use. It just means “it’s attached to (or enclosed with) this letter/message.

It's a way of saying "find it attached." Just happens to be a common phrasing for formal letters and emails. 

Imagine a colon after the word attached.

Attached is the location - it’s like saying “please find in the fridge the milk” which is weirdly inverted, probably archaic, but used all the time with email attachments.

It’s a formalism for “your confirmation of enrolment letter is attached”.

Yeah it’s just business-speak short hand. Maybe it’s less weird if there’s a list. Please find attached: enrollment letter, sticker and lanyard.

I believe in origin it's an extension of "please find enclosed" (that is, included in the same envelope), which would be used when those documents were sent physically. I do think those two sentences have subtly different meanings, which in most cases will be read interchangeably but in some circumstances might not be. "Please find attached your X" means "I hope you find your X attached", whereas "please find your X" would normally mean "go locate your X (in some other place, not here)". Imagine that instead we were talking about plans for a garage we were going to build next to a house, and we'd been discussing whether or not the garage would be connected to the house or freestanding alongside it. "Please find attached the garage plans" means "I have attached the garage plans"; "please find the attached garage plans" means "I need you to go locate the plans for the attached garage (which might be in another email)".

Formal phrasing

It is “your confirmation of enrolment letter”. That fact of it being attached or not does not change that. Putting “attached” after “your” would mean you have a different unattached letter, which does not make sense.

This is an example of the flexibility of word order in English. It often seems like it has less flexibility than other languages, because it doesn’t have a case system or a declension system, and yet there very much is flexibility in word order. They could have also said: “Please find your Confirmation of Enrollment Letter attached.” “Attached please find your Confirmation of Enrollment Letter.” They all mean the same thing. In some instances, changing the word order creates a subtle change in meaning, but this is an example where - I’d argue - all three mean the exact same thing.

Everyone has explained that this is basically just a convention, and that is all you need to know, but it might help to think of it as a clarification for find, and remember that while “attached” is most common it isn’t the only option. What I mean by a clarification for find, is that you should imagine a little conversation: “Please find…” “Find where?” “Attached,” “Oh yes, what’s attached?” “Your enrolment letter.” You could say “attached enrolment letter” which would in theory mean something different. In that case attached is an adjective, it describes the enrolment letter, as opposed to naming a location. Alternatives to attached would be: “below” - as in “please find below my answers to the questions you raised in the meeting” (followed by a list of answers which are found below in the sense that you need to scroll down the email to find them. Or, “At link” - as in click this link to find the document which is hosted elsewhere. I’d say this was rarer, you would just say, “the course guide is available at universitywebsitedotcom” In physical correspondence you have more options: “Enclosed” - has already been mentioned - in the same envelope as the letter you are reading. Or, “Overleaf” - on the same piece of paper, but on the other side.