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Wording Wedding Invitations By Melissa J Wantuck  |
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 The most important part of your wedding invitation is to convey to your guests the date, time and place of your wedding. How you go about doing that is completely up to you and you can be as creative as you want, keeping in mind that you clearly present the basic information.
Wedding etiquette offers detailed information for wording wedding invitations from presenting names to the use of punctuation. These guidelines are an excellent place to start. They will give you ideas to help you decide what you will want to use as you write your invitation.
Traditional
Wedding etiquette is based on the traditional model of invitation wording. It is a formal style and covers all of the aspects of the invitation.
The first aspect is the host. Who is hosting the wedding typically opens the invitation, the host being the person or persons paying for the wedding. The host may be the bride, groom, bride and groom, bride’s parents, groom’s parents, both parents hosting, another relative, friend, etc.
The request of the host follows, which is the request of the guest to attend the marriage. How this line is worded may be indicative of the type of ceremony you will have, namely a worship service versus a non-church service.
Next name the couple (if they are not the host) and follow that by the date, time and place.
The following are rules for spelling and wording conventions on the invitation:
1. Write in third person
2. Capitalize proper nouns, places, days of the week and months
3. Capitalize the beginning of lines that only appear as the beginning of a sentence or phrase if they do not begin with a person, date, time or address
4. Only use periods after courtesy titles
5. Use British spellings of words like “honour” and “favour”
6. Use courtesy titles before names of people, exceptions being the bride and groom or just the bride
7. Use the formal presentation for parents’ names: Mr. and Mrs. Michael Smith
8. Use full names for the bride and groom, including writing out the entire middle name
9. Do not use nicknames
10. Only use commas in dates and places
11. Spell out all numbers in dates and times
12. Do not use abbreviations in addresses
Reception information may be placed on the wedding invitation or on a separate card included in the envelope. If receptions are only for adults, include “adult” in the wording, such as “Adult Reception Follows,” or on the response card, such as “Number of Adults Attending.”
For the return address on the invitation envelope and response card envelope use the host’s address.
Contemporary
Contemporary wedding invitations are less formal than traditional ones while still conveying the basic information of who, what, when and where.
Wording may include a poem or phrase selected by the couple and people mentioned might include the parents or just the couple.
Some couples choose to have the response card returned to the bride if say she does not live with her parents who are the hosts and having the guests respond to her is more convenient in the planning process.
There are many websites that offer wording samples for quick and easy perusal. Here is an example of one where you can view samples of both traditional and contemporary styles: www.invitationconsultants.com/sw-wedding.aspx.
Whatever the choice, traditional versus contemporary, what you as the bride and groom should remember is you are conveying on the invitation to your guests that your wedding is a representation of who you are celebrated in the style of your choosing.
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