Question About Writing Style

[kjf512]

hello,

is the writing style in the BoM different from other writings of joseph smith? or are they the same, sort of KJV like.

[a-train]

This was already talked about in another thread, but there are different styles within the Book of Mormon. They are all different from Joseph Smith's style in other writings.

-a-train

[Snow]

hello,

is the writing style in the BoM different from other writings of joseph smith? or are they the same, sort of KJV like.

The BoM was most definately different than anything else JS had written or could have written at the time. His wife, who was probably the best witness to the translation of the BoM outside Oliver Cowdery said that at the time JS could barely compose a coherent sentence, let alone a complex book.

That being said, Joseph, I think, put his revelations and the modern text of the BoM in his own words processed through the lens of his own understanding so I think that there are some similarities, however some professors put the BoM though a language/style program and determined, in their model and opinion, that there were something like 13 distinct voices or author styles in the BoM.

[the_jason]

The Book of Mormon was not written by Joseph Smith. It's not his writing style.

[Outshined]

This came up not long ago. Computer analysis showed that the BOM bears no resemblance to JS's writing style.

[Outshined]

Found it! Computer analysis was performed on the Book Of Mormon. From Stylemetry Authorship Analysis:

Three different types of "wordprints" or stylometry were used in examining the authors of the Book of Mormon: (1) frequency of letters, (2) frequency of commonly occurring non-contextual words, (3) frequency of rarely occurring noncontextual words. Three types of statistical methods will be used with this data: Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA), Cluster Analysis, and Discriminant or Classification Analysis.

The Book of Mormon and non-Book of Mormon authors were clearly separate and a straight line could be drawn between both groups.

Joseph Smith was also compared with the four major Book of Mormon authors and plotted in two dimensions. Again each author clustered by themselves and Joseph Smith's writing is very definitely distinct from that of the authors in the Book of Mormon.

http://www.lightplanet.com/response/style.htm