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I'm writing to bring to your attention the unprofessional attitude of one of your staff member. (From a book and some online resources)
I feel like it should be:
I'm writing to bring your attention to the unprofessional attitude of one of your staff member.
Is it a typo or not? Thank you!
The image is that you are carrying something which needs attention and putting it in front of the listener. So you bring the thing to the listener - or to the listener's attention. In this image, you don't bring the attention to the thing.
The sentence is a bit more difficult to understand because the long noun phrase the unprofessional attitude of one of your staff members has moved from the normal Direct Object position. Because it is very long, the speaker has moved it to the end of the sentence (this is known as heavy noun phrase shift).
If we put the phrases in the normal order, the sentence looks like this:
This last clause has the same structure as:
Perhaps the best way to analyze this is to determine what is being "brought." In this case unprofessionalism is being brought to someone's attention. However, you can't bring someone's attention to anything. So the better choice would be "I would like to bring to your attention the unprofessional..."
Also, it should be the plural "staff members" not the singular.
Bring someone or something to someone's attention means to make someone aware of someone or something as in
Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
I am grateful for your bringing her to my attention.
Also see draw someone's attention to someone or something & call someone's attention to something
I am writing to bring to your attention the unprofessional attitude of one of your staff members.
It's not a typo; the sentence is correct grammatically.
However, your sentence "I am writing to bring your attention to ...." is not correct grammatically. You can bring something to someone's attention, but you cannot bring someone's attention to something.
However, you can call/draw someone's attention to something. So you can say:
"I am writing to draw/call your attention to the unprofessional attitude of ...........".
Both the original and your version are fine.
I wouldn't say one is particularly better or worse than the other. The to bring to one's attention idiom is commonly used, and not a problem here, but there's also no reason you couldn't avoid it and just use to bring one's attention to. Grammatically, some things have changed, but the meaning of the phrase has not.
No, this is not a typo. In fact, this is a very widely used idiom. 'To point out something to someone' simply means:
to make someone aware of something; to mention or show something to someone
You can read more about it here.
bring your attention toliterally means I pick up your attention and carry it around, whilebring to your attentionmeans I pick the item and carry it around. Both is possible.