Wedding Breeze

When it comes to traditional wedding invitation wording, the principles tend to be quite different from normal, everyday writing.  These special etiquette guidelines apply to punctuation, spelling, abbreviations and capitalization. 

In regards to proper wording, punctuation and capitalization for the verse on your wedding invitations, here are tips to keep in mind.

• Punctuation use within a verse is not always typical.  Periods do not appear at the end of sentences but only after title abbreviations such as Mr. and Mrs.  Besides placing commas within sentences as needed, they also appear between the city and state of addresses and the day and date of your wedding.
• Despite sentences not ending in punctuation, the first word of each sentence is still capitalized as in normal writing. Each line of a verse is not always considered its own sentence since complete sentences may continue to the next line.  This will be reflected by having only the first word of a sentence being capitalized.
• The first letter of all title abbreviations, proper names, days of the week and months are capitalized.  The year, written out as a phrase, most often has only the first letter of the first word capitalized.

  For a more modern look, there are examples in which nothing within the invitation verse is capitalized OR just the opposite where every letter in the verse appears in an upper-case font with the true capital letters being slightly larger. 

• Dates, years and times are printed by using words instead of numbers.
  • Saturday, the third of January
  • Two thousand and eleven
  • at five o’clock in the evening

  Numbers are acceptable when listed as part of a street address (i.e. 10 Main Street).

• There are many ways to phrase the line that actually extends the invitation to guests.  If the word ‘honor’ is used, it is most commonly spelled as ‘honour’ for more formality as in a religious ceremony – ‘request the honour of your presence’.  The spelling as ‘honor’ can be used for an informal or more casual wedding.

There are also certain things to be aware of when it comes to abbreviations within your wedding invitation wording.  Some of these etiquette guidelines pertain to both your invitation verse and when addressing the envelopes.

• Non-professional titles such as Mr. and Mrs. are acceptable abbreviations.
• Professional titles such as Doctor should be spelled out.
• Names of states as well as the words ‘Street’, ‘Boulevard’, ‘Avenue’, ‘Trail’, etc., should be written out completely.
• Symbols are not appropriate so the word ‘and’ should be spelled out.

As you can see there are several traditional wedding invitation wording etiquette rules so hopefully these tips will sum them up for you.  The important thing to remember is that if you find yourself in doubt, there are many sample verses to review as examples.