find improvement wish

Dear,
I prefer using find with script in this way: find $dir $pattern.where
pattern=" -name *.sh ! -name *.txt ... etc."

The built findutils version is 4.7. it fails to work with such message

find: paths must precede expression: 'test.sh'
find: possible unquoted pattern after predicate '-name'

I know when there are multiple files, such as  a.txt b.txt c.txt, find .
-name *.txt will cause such messages and solve with quoted the '*.txt'
It is more convenient to define a pattern and no need to quote all
extensions one by one, line by line using scripts.
Thanks