Wedding Invitation Wording Etiquette - 5 common mistakes
Wedding invitation wording is one item most people have questions about.
And you know what... you should! How many times in the past have you gotten married?
I love helping our clients with questions.
Sometimes it's easier to talk about some of the most common mistakes, so here goes...
1. Punctuation
On wedding invitations, the line break itself serves as punctuation.
Therefore, there are no commas, period, or even semicolon as would be used on other types of writing/invitations. For the most part, the only periods on an invitation are after "Mr." and "Mrs.".
You would add a comma before "junior" but not before "III".
A comma is used between the day of the week and the month (Saturday, the eighth of March).
2. Capitalization
The first word of a sentence should be capitalized.
You should not capitalize every word in the sentence - only the first word of a sentence.
The day of the week and month are capitalized, the year is not.
Proper nouns are capitalized (Austin, Texas).
3. Host line with divorced parents
When divorced parents are hosting and their names are listed on your invitation, etiquette says each name should be on its own line with no "and" in between the names.
i.e.:
Mr. Jane Morgan
Mr. Peter Morgan
request the honor of your presence...
4. Request line
There are tons of options when choosing the wording for your request line.
If you are using the most traditional wording, keep in mind the wording for a house of worship is different than wording for a ceremony held elsewhere.
When getting married in a house of worship, it is most traditional to use:
"request the honor of your presence".
If the ceremony is not in a house of worship, it is most traditional to use:
"request the pleasure of your company".
5. Marriage vs Wedding
When a couple hosts, the invitation wording should be to the "wedding" and not the "marriage".
When parents host, it is fine to use either "wedding" or "marriage".
I hope this helps take some of the stress of wedding planning away.
Of course if you have any additional questions, let me know :)
Post a Comment