Punctuation and Title – A guide to wedding invitation etiquette Part 3

This is the third and final part of our short series on Wedding Invitation Etiquette.  And in this article I am going to take a closer look at Titles and Decorations and Punctuation on the invitation.

Titles and Decoration
To follow formal convention titles should be spelt out in full, i.e ‘The Earl and Countess of Stradbroke’ rather than the ‘Lord and Lady Stradbroke’. The title ‘The Honourable’ occupies a curious position in that while it is not supposed to be usedby hosts to describe themselves, it can be used by them to describe the groom, though in the past many honourable hosts have tended to disagree with this.
‘Dr’ is customarily used when decribing doctors of medicine, not so much with doctors of philosophy. Academic qualifications are never used, and it is unusual to use decorations such as ‘OBE’, ‘CMG’ etc after the names of host, bride or groom.

Armed Services
It is normal to include the name of the regiment or service the groom may belong to as follows:

to
Captain James Hamilton (Scots Guards)
at St Mary’s Church, Ampney Crucis

Continental Invitations
It is common in Europe for the text to be printed on the inside of the folded card and for the invitation to be repeated on one side for the groom’s family and on the other for that of the bride.  Most wedding stationery suppliers can print any Eurpoean language from copy supplied but there may be an extra profing charge.

Faire Part
A practice much used in Europe, the faire part is an announcement of the wedding, which can also be used as invitation.

Punctuation
As a general rule it is best to use the minimum of punctuation. For abbreviations we recommend following Fowler’s Modern English Usage so that where the abbreviation ends with the last letter of the word – Mr, Mrs or St – no full stop is used; while if the abbreviation ends with a letter in the middle of the word – for example, Rev. – a full stop is used.

That is the end of this short guide to Wedding Invitation etiquette and thank goes again to the Letterpress of Cirencester for letting us reproduce information from their wedding guide. If you missed the previous installments please click on the links below.
Part 1
Part 2