Which line should go on your wedding stationery?

This is the point where an English-language suite parts company with a German or Austrian one. German wedding stationery carries a Spruch — a short verse or quotation — almost as standard: on the invitation, in the order of service, on the thank-you card. A formal English invitation has no room for one, because the wording is a fixed formula that already fills the card.

What follows: the difference between a reading and a printed line, the places where a line earns its space, five tests that catch a bad choice before it reaches the printer, the cutting and crediting rules, and the copyright position in the short form that fits a card. That last one gets skipped more often than any of the others, because everything on the internet looks free.

Couples in the UK, Ireland, the US and Australia meet this question twice, and the two versions have almost nothing in common.

• The reading is spoken during the ceremony, runs one to three minutes, and is delivered by somebody you asked. It has a reader, a moment, and an audience sitting still. The standard repertoire — 1 Corinthians 13, e. e. cummings, the passage from Captain Corelli's Mandolin, a Neruda sonnet — exists because those texts read aloud well at length.
• The printed line is one or two lines on a card. Nobody performs it, nothing introduces it, and it competes with the information around it. A reading rarely survives being cut down to that, which is why a line lifted straight out of your reading tends to look thin on paper.

Choose them separately, and choose the reading first. It is agreed with your celebrant, registrar or minister, and in a religious ceremony it may come from a set list — one item on the longer list of things a church requires before it will marry you. Once the readings are settled you know what has already been said, and the printed line has to do something they did not.

Worth knowing if you are planning or attending a wedding in Germany or Austria: a church wedding there involves a Trauspruch, a single Bible verse the couple choose in advance with the minister. It is read during the ceremony and then follows the marriage — printed on the wedding candle, entered on the certificate, and usually carried through the whole stationery suite. Nothing in an English-language wedding works that way. The nearest equivalent is a reading, and a reading is chosen for the ceremony, not for the paperwork. So if you see the same verse on the candle, on the order of service and on the thank-you card at a German wedding, that is what it is: one chosen verse doing the job of five.

Five places, five different jobs. The same line rarely does two of them well.

• The invitation. The formal wording — host line, request, names, date, place, reply instruction — already fills the card, and every one of those has to be findable at a glance. If you want a line here, put it on the reverse, on the inside of a folded card, or under the host line, never above the details. What guests actually open the card for — those details, the reply deadline, and the awkward sentences about gifts and children — is settled by the etiquette the wording follows.
• The save-the-date. The most forgiving place in the suite, because the card carries four pieces of information and has room left over. A line here also sets the tone months ahead of the date the invitations go out.
• The order of service. Called a wedding program in the US. Here the line does real work: it tells guests what the next hour is about. It sits on the cover or the first inside page, and it should not repeat a reading printed four pages later. It is also the one piece of stationery guests read during the event itself.
• The wedding website. The line goes above directions, timings and the reply form. It can be more personal than anything on paper, because only invited guests see it — which holds only while the page sits behind a password or an invite code. But it still has to be short, or the welcome turns into a preface.
• The thank-you card. This one looks back. A line about beginnings, chosen for the invitation and reused here, reads oddly six weeks after the wedding, because it is still in the wrong tense. Thank-you cards are the last piece in the suite and want a closing line, not an opening one.

Menus, place cards and signage occasionally carry one too. Resist it. Those pieces exist to answer a question, and a line printed on them delays the answer.

The rule that saves time is to look for a line per place rather than a line for the wedding, and to accept that one or two places will end up without one. Blank space on a card never reads as a mistake. A filled-in space does.

A line you like in a list tells you nothing yet. These five tests sort out what will bother you later.

• The swap test. Put two strangers' names above the line. If it fits them just as well, it is interchangeable — which is fine for a classical verse and fatal for a line meant to sound like you.
• The read-aloud test. Say it out loud, in your ordinary speaking voice. A great deal that looks solemn in print sounds borrowed when spoken. For anything going in the order of service this is the deciding test, because spoken is how guests will receive it.
• The speaker test. Work out who is talking in the sentence. A line written in the first person singular rings false the moment two people sign the card; a line lecturing about love in general reaches nobody, because there is no one inside it.
• The promise test. Some lines make a claim about your marriage that neither of you would make out loud. If you find yourself quietly softening it as you read, it belongs on somebody else's card.
• The ten-year test. You will find this card again in a box. Plain images and quiet sentences age slowly; wordplay and references to whatever is popular this year do not.

Two warning signs are reliable enough to stand in for the whole list. The first: you have to explain it. If the line needs a sentence from you before it makes sense, it will not work on a card, where it stands without you. The second: you found it in a list and did not recognise it. Disagreeing with each other, by contrast, is a result rather than a problem — a line one of you merely tolerates ends up on every card and in every album.

Most good lines are too long for a card. Cutting is allowed and usually necessary. A few moves save the line; a few break it.

• One image per line. If the text carries two comparisons, cut the weaker one out completely. Two images side by side weaken each other, because a reader glancing at a card builds only one picture.
• Subordinate clauses first. The part after the comma that explains why the first part is true almost never earns its space.
• Do not touch the wording. Swapping words, smoothing tenses and adjusting pronouns turns a quotation into a version nobody wrote, still carrying somebody else's name underneath it. Cut, do not rewrite.
• Mark what you removed. If you cut from the middle of a sentence and print the author's name, an ellipsis signals the gap — three dots, and no square brackets around them unless the source itself already had one there. That is the difference between a quotation and a claim about what somebody wrote.
• Break lines by sense. A line ends where a unit of meaning ends, not where the column runs out. A sentence that trips over its own line break looks careless in print, and nobody can say straight away why.
• Print it at size. Everything is legible on a screen. A proof at actual size shows in seconds whether the line still looks calm; which typefaces survive that is covered in choosing fonts for wedding stationery.

The credit goes underneath the line, not inside it: first name spelled out, surname spelled correctly, the work named only if the title is short. And check the attribution against a second, independent source before you print a name, because quotation sites are least reliable at exactly the point that ends up on the card.

Two examples turn up constantly on English-language wedding stationery. "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it" is printed under Goethe's name everywhere, and it is not Goethe: it comes from John Anster's very loose 1835 verse translation of Faust, and it was made famous by the Scottish mountaineer W. H. Murray in 1951. The much-shared line about knowing you are in love when reality is finally better than your dreams is attributed to Dr Seuss and appears nowhere in his work. Print the line without a name if you cannot find a second source for the attribution — an unattributed line costs you nothing, and a wrong name is a statement you made in print.

Quotations look free because they are everywhere. Legally most of them are not, and a printed card is a published copy.

The rule covering most cases in the UK, Ireland, Australia and across the EU is life plus seventy: copyright in a literary work runs until seventy years after the author's death, counted from the end of that year. The US works differently, with the date of publication carrying the weight — anything published there up to and including 1930 is now in the public domain, while a great deal of what came afterwards is still protected. W. B. Yeats died in 1939, so his poems are clear under the first rule, and the ones he published before 1931 are clear under the American one as well. A writer who died within living memory is clear under neither, however often their lines appear on cards.

Three cases look freer than they are.

• Translations. A translation is its own work with its own term. Saint-Exupéry died in 1944 and the French text has fallen out of copyright across much of the world — the English translation you would be copying has not, and it is the English you would be printing.
• Bible verses. The verse is ancient; the translation is not. Modern versions are copyrighted works owned by their publishers, and each publisher sets out on its permissions page how much may be quoted without asking and which copyright line has to appear with it. There is a further wrinkle in the UK: the King James Version sits under perpetual Crown copyright administered by Cambridge University Press, although outside the UK it is treated as public domain.
• Song lyrics. The commonest mistake, because nearly every couple has a song. Lyrics are almost always in copyright, the rights are managed far more actively than most poetry, and a single line can require a licence.

Do not count on fair dealing or fair use. The UK has had a general quotation exception since 2014, but it asks that the quotation be fair, no longer than its purpose needs, taken from a work already published, and printed with an acknowledgement — and decoration is a thin purpose. Fair dealing in Ireland and Australia is tied to listed categories such as criticism, review and news reporting, and a line printed above a date is none of them. US fair use is a four-factor balance, and reprinting a short poem or a lyric almost whole, to do the job the original was written to do, sits at the weak end of it. One practical distinction matters more than any of that. A printed card sent to people you know is the quiet side of the problem; a wedding website that anybody with the link can open is the exposed side. If you will not give up a protected line, ask the publisher for permission or put the page behind a password — and name the author either way.

All of which is an argument for the sources you already have, which are usually better:

• something one of you actually said — out of a message, out of the proposal, out of an evening you both remember
• a line from an old letter, or from a card that stayed in the family
• a phrase that has been in your family long enough that both sides recognise it instantly
• a line from your vows: too late for the invitation, exactly right for the thank-you card
• a line out of one of your readings, in the rare case that it survives the cut — it is already chosen, and it ties the ceremony to the paper

Lines like these pass all five tests on their own, because they fit exactly one couple. They rarely sound literary, and that is the advantage: guests can tell a line that was looked up from a line that was already yours, even when they cannot say how.

Then there is economy. One line running through the whole suite reads as a motif; five different ones read like a rack of shop-bought cards. If the same line keeps coming back — small on the save-the-date, large on the cover of the order of service, as the last line of the thank-you card — it stays with people without your ever having to explain it.