Seeing the message before it goes out

A typo in a message sent to two hundred people is two hundred typos. The preview beside the message editor exists so you find it once, before any of them go out. It renders what you have written against a real guest from your own list - the first name on it - with their name and their link already filled in, so the thing you are reading is the thing somebody will actually receive. Until there is a guest on the list, there is nobody to render against and no preview to read.

Placeholder text is too well behaved

Sample data is chosen to fit. A placeholder name is two tidy words of a sensible length, correctly capitalised, with no brackets in it. Your real list is not like that. It has an aunt saved as “Aunty Malini”, a household saved as “Mr and Mrs Fernando and family”, and one entry you typed at eleven at night as “kasun (office)”.

A greeting that reads perfectly as “Hi Guest Name” reads badly as “Hi kasun (office)”. That is not really a fault in your wording. It is a fault in the list, and the preview is where you notice it while there is still time to correct the list rather than apologise for it.

Sample data is also complete. Every field is filled, because somebody filled them in to make the sample look right. Real guests are missing things, and the missing things are where most of the damage comes from.

Add one guest before you write the message

There is one thing worth knowing before you go looking for the preview. It renders against the first real guest linked to your invitation. If nobody is on the list yet, there is nothing to render against, and the panel is not shown at all. So the order that works is: add a guest or two, then write the message, then read it back.

You do not choose which guest it uses, either. Treat what you see as one sample from your list rather than a survey of it.

The four things that break

Almost every mistake at this stage is one of four, and all four are invisible until a real guest is standing in for the tokens.

• A token that is not quite a token. Tokens are matched exactly, so {name} is filled in and {Name} is not. A capital letter, or a near miss like {first_name}, survives into the sent message as the word in curly brackets. Guests notice it immediately, and it reads as carelessness rather than as a technical slip.
• A token with nothing behind it. When a token has no value for that guest, because no date is set or no ceremony has been titled, it renders as nothing at all rather than as a warning. That is the right behaviour, but it leaves a hole in the sentence you built around it: “We would love to see you on .” You only ever see that gap in the rendered version.
• The wrong form of address for a household. The {you} token follows how each guest is filed, so the same sentence reads “you”, “you both” or “your family” depending on the guest. A family of five filed as an individual gets a message addressed to one person, and the cousin who was always going to bring four people has just been told the invitation is for him alone.
• Line length. Long names, several ceremony links in one message, or a line you wrote to sit neatly above the link, all move once real values go in. What looked like three lines is five, and the link is now below the fold in the chat.

The check to run before the first send

None of it takes long, and this is the last point at which a mistake is still free.

• Read the preview top to bottom as the guest, not as the author. You wrote the sentence, so your eye repairs it automatically. Reading it in the rendered panel, in the order they will read it, is what breaks that habit.
• Check the link is actually in there. The editor warns you when the links token is missing, because a message without it is an invitation with no invitation in it.
• Read the first line on its own. That line, and not the rest of it, is what shows in their chat list before they open anything.
• Look at the punctuation on both sides of every token. Stray commas and full stops are what turn an empty value into visible nonsense.
• Say the name out loud. If you would not greet that person that way in person, the list entry needs editing, not the message.

What the preview will not catch

It shows you the message, not the invitation. The card itself is a separate thing to check, on a phone, at the size a guest will see it. It also cannot tell you whether a phone number is right. A perfectly worded message sent to a digit that is wrong is still a guest who never heard from you, and the only cure for that is reading the numbers back against wherever you copied them from.

There is also a scale at which none of this matters much. If your list is fifteen people, you will read every message as you go, because each send opens one chat with the message already in the box and you press send yourself. The preview earns its place on long lists, and on lists where the message changes shape as it goes: one guest sees a single link, the next sees three, and the greeting is different again for the household after that. Nobody holds every version of that in their head.

Fixing what you find

Most of what the preview exposes is a guest-list problem rather than a wording problem. A name saved in shorthand, a household filed as one person, a guest attached to the wrong ceremony. Those are worth correcting at the source, because that one entry drives all three moving parts of the message at once: the greeting at the top, the pronoun in the middle, and the set of links at the bottom. Rewording the message around a bad entry hides it for one send and no longer.

When the wording itself is the problem, change it and read the preview again. It is worth doing this before the first send rather than after the tenth, because the messages already delivered stay as they were sent. Editing your message changes what goes out next, not what has gone already.

Related: Sending invitations on WhatsApp