I was having a debate with someone about how this phrase sounds, as it seems incorrect to me but it's been proofread many times in e-mail (yes at an american company), without anyone saying anything about it.
EDIT: I don't know why it's wrong (if it is), which is why I'm asking the question. The current answer won't be accepted unless the author can elaborate.
EDIT 2: I was writing to a recruiter that I know on a professional level, and was getting help on a way to eloquently request that I add them as a connection on a certain social networking site. The way I would have worded it would have been "I would like to connect with you…" or something of the sort.
EDIT 3: I was trying to focus more on the placement and usage of the word "please" in this sentence, as it was the part that stuck out to me the most, and the sentence sounds more correct without it. To that point, maybe it's the tense of the verb that's odd about it? What if the sentence was, "I want to please connect with you"?
Best Answer
Parentheticals can be inserted into matrix sentences with far fewer restrictions than would normally apply.
sounds a little odd, but I can't see that anyone could judge it ungrammatical. Whether or not the intrinsic parenthetical nature of the politeness discourse marker 'please' allows its insertion here without the brackets is debatable, but I think that there is a move towards greater freedom in this area. Certainly
would normally be written without brackets, and in exactly this way, though placing the 'please' in initial or final position rather than medially (within the matrix sentence) seems more logical.
The check I feel with using OP's version is that "I wanted to connect / get in touch with you" is such a heavily hedged request that it appears not to be one at all – making the use of 'please' dubious.